Erin Manning Thought in The Act

Thought in the Act
Thought in the Act

Passages in the Ecology
of Experience
Erin Manning and Brian Massumi
University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis
London
The authors would like to acknowledge the generous support of the Social Sciences
and Humanities Council of Canada (SSHRC).
Chapter 1 was previously published as “Coming Alive in a World of Texture: For

Neurodiversity,” in Dance, Politics, and Co-Immunity, ed. Gerald Siegmund and Stefan
Hoelscher (Berlin: Diaphanes, 2013). Chapter 4 was previously published as “No Title
Yet,” in Le cabinet de Bracha: Carnets, Dessins, Peintures, Scanographies 1981–2011, ed.
Patrick Le Nouëne (Angers: Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Angers, 2011), 37–52.
Copyright 2014 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photo-
copying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press

111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401–2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Manning, Erin.
Thought in the Act : Passages in the Ecology of Experience / Erin Manning
and Brian Massumi.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8166-7966-9 (hc : acid-free paper)
isbn 978-0-8166-7967-6 (pb :acid-free paper)
1. Creation (Literary, Artistic, etc.)—Philosophy. 2. Aesthetics. 3. Thought and
thinking—Philosophy. 4. Experience. I. Massumi, Brian. II. Title.
bf408.m2346 2014
153.3’5—dc23 2013038692
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface vii
Part I. Passages
Coming Alive in a World of Texture: For Neurodiversity

3
A Perspective of the Universe:

Alfred North Whitehead Meets Arakawa and Gins
23
Just Like That. William Forsythe:

Between Movement and Language
31
No Title Yet. Bracha Ettinger: Moved by Light

59
Part II. Propositions
For Thought in the Act

83
Postscript to Generating the Impossible

135
Notes 153
References 169
Index 175
Preface
Philosophy is [. . .] a practice of concepts [that] must be judged

as a function of other practices with which it interferes. [. . .] It
is at the level of interference of many practices that things hap-
pen, beings, images, concepts, all kinds of events.
—gilles deleuze, The Time-Image (translation modified)
This book runs interference. Its goal is to open philosophy to its outside,
to challenge philosophy to compose with concepts already on their way
in another mode, in the mode of artistic practice, in the mode of event-
formation, of activism, of dance, even of everyday perception. It writes
into this difference, composing across the breach between philosophy and
art, philosophy and dance, writing and painting, speaking and moving.
Philosophy’s outside is a generative environment. Philosophy does not
yet know how to speak. Its thinking is active, uneasy because always in the
encounter. Giving words to the encounter is what we have attempted to
do here. Not to solve the riddle of how art and philosophy, activism and
philosophy, move together, but to ask ourselves what writing can do to
make thought-felt what art can do, with philosophy.
Every practice is a mode of thought, already in the act. To dance: a
thinking in movement. To paint: a thinking through color. To perceive
in the everyday: a thinking of the world’s varied ways of affording itself.
In each of these cases, and the others encountered in this book, the prac-
tice in question will be construed as a mode of thought creatively in the act.
The practice that is philosophy has no exclusive claim to thought or the
composition of concepts. Like every practice, its only claim is to its own
techniques. For us, the techniques of philosophy are writing techniques.
v ii
v iii
This book runs writing interference. It seeks to compose concepts, of a cer-

tain kind, in writing. And in the composing, it articulates in the breach,
in the fragile difference between modes of thought, in the act.
Our goal: to experiment with the breach. Not to tell art how to think, or
to tell dance how to understand itself. But to bring into relief techniques,
in the painting, in the dancing, in the creation of events, from which a
singular proposition may breach. For it is in the breaching that thought
acts most intensely, in practices co-composing.
For us, to write philosophically is not to cast a predefined conceptual
trawlnet into the waters of an outside practice. It is more like dipping into
the same creative pond. A stone dropped into a pond produces a ripple
pattern. Two stones dropped into the same pond produce two ripple pat-
terns. Where the ripples intersect, a new and complex pattern emerges,
reducible to neither one nor the other. This is the kind of conceptual inter-
ference pattern the book’s writing aspires to. Don’t just write about dance.
As William Forsythe says, dance that thought around. Dance that choreo-
graphic thought around in philosophy’s act of writing.
In our own acts of writing together, we have had to learn how to ripple
the difference between two stone-hard heads. While negotiating our dif-
ferent ways of dropping into the breach of the practices, we have found
ways to encounter together. We have had to learn to compose an uneasy,
two-headed thinking in the act, across a multiplicity of practices. Uneasy,
because thought together is not thought controlled. Uneasy, because writ-
ing in the thinking is an intrinsically fragile art, however many heads are
involved. Uneasy, but beautifully intense. Because when skulls bump, the
resulting brain-wave interference-patterns can be a revelation to both.
One never writes alone. As Deleuze and Guattari say, one writing alone
is already a crowd. Our words in this book are never without the echoes of
the voices of those whose difference we chose to write with. Not to men-
tion the moves, gestures, colors, architectures, and events of the creative
practices we encountered. A veritable cacophony. Or better: an ecology.
Composing each of the chapters involved reinventing our techniques for
writing together in a way that could distill from the cacophonous ecology
of our experiences together a shared line of thought, one that we hope
has done justice to the thinkings-in-the-act that we have had the good
fortune to experience firsthand through residencies and interactions with
creative practitioners.
P re fa ce
ix
Our goal was not simply to describe the complexity of a work’s work-
ings, but to activate its modalities of thought, its rhythms, in a new con-
certation. This meant finding our way into artistic practices to reconnect
with philosophy’s outside, to endeavor to make felt how philosophy can
co-compose with other creative practices. Too often, writing stands to the
side, outside the action, as though the “real” work happened elsewhere,
as though what writing was equipped to do with “real” practices was merely
to describe them—or to proscribe for them, in judgment. We took it as the
task of this book to make it felt, in its own rhythms, that writing is as real
and creative a practice as any, and that it lives in an ecology of experience,
with all the doings adrop, and all the makings enacting.
The hope is that this might be seen as a book of techniques—techniques
for composing with creative practice, for composing emergent collectiv-
ities, for composing thought in the multiplicitous act. Technique, as we
understand it throughout, belongs to the act. Techniques are not descrip-
tive devices—they are springboards. They are not framing devices—they
activate a practice from within. They set in motion.
Thank you, Bracha Ettinger, for opening your home to us and for shar-
ing the painting process inhabiting there. Thank you, William Forsythe and
the Forsythe Company, for putting up with us for a month of questions
and cacophonous participation in your movements of thought. Thank you,
Arakawa and Gins, for your acute curiosity and your generosity in dialogue
and for providing us with a panoply of thinking-body procedures for the
writing. Thank you, DJ Savarese, Amanda Baggs, and Tito Mukhopadhyay,
for the perceptual acuity with which you share your world.
Thank you to all the members of the SenseLab with whom we have
had the privilege of experimenting in the collective organization of
events exploring how art and philosophy can co-compose. For both
of us, the SenseLab’s varied activities have been a privileged incubator for
the thinking-in-the-act this book is all about. Over the past ten years, we
have been lucky to be able to gather around us and circulate among philos-
ophers, artists, activists, and researchers who have been unfailingly enthu-
siastic in the process of developing new techniques for the invention of
modes of thought in an event-based ecology of experience. This book is
dedicated to you.
P re fa ce
Part I
Passages
Coming Alive in a
World of Texture
For Neurodiversity
The notion of existence involves the notion of an environment

of existences and of types of existences. Any one instance of
existence involves other existences, connected with it and yet
beyond it. This notion of the environment introduces the no-
tion of the “more and less,” and of multiplicity.
—alfred north whitehead, Modes of Thought
More and Less (Multiplicity)

“There was very little difference in meaning,” says autistic Daina Krumins,
“between the children next to the lake that I was playing with and the
turtle sitting on the log. It seems,” she continues, “that when most peo-
ple think of something being alive they really mean, human” (quoted in
Miller 2003, 23–89).1
What is it we really mean, when we say “human”? According to autism
activist Amanda Baggs, we certainly don’t mean “autistic” (2010c). We
mean “neurotypical,” we mean expressing oneself predominantly in spo-
ken language, and most of all, we mean being immediately focused on
humans to the detriment of other elements in the environment.2 “Most
people attend to human voices above all else” (Krumins).
“I hear the rocks and the trees” (Mukhopadhyay in Miller 2003, 54).
For autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen, to hear the rocks and the
trees on an equal footing with the voices of children is a sign of what he
calls “mindblindness.” Mindblindness is generally defined as an inabil-
ity to develop an awareness of what is in the mind of another human. To
3
4
have mindblindness, Baron-Cohen suggests, is to lack empathy. It is to be

generally unrelational. He says that this is what defines autistics (1995).3
Yet from the autistic, we hear neither a rejection of the human, nor
a turning away from relation. What we hear is an engagement with the
more-than human: “I attend to everything the same way with no discrim-
ination, so that the caw of the crow in the tree is as clear and important
as the voice of the person I’m walking with” (Krumins in Miller 2003, 86).
And an engagement with a more textured relating: “My world is organized
around textures. [. . .] All emotions, perceptions, my whole world [. . .] [has]
been influenced by textures” (Krumins in Miller 2003, 87).
To experience the texture of the world “without discrimination” is not
indifference. Texture is patterned, full of contrast and movement, gradients
and transitions. It is complex and differentiated. To attend to everything
“the same way” is not an inattention to life. It is to pay equal attention to
the full range of life’s texturing complexity, with an entranced and unhier-
archized commitment to the way in which the organic and the inorganic,
color, sound, smell, and rhythm, perception and emotion, intensely inter-
weave into the “aroundness” of a textured world, alive with difference.4 It
is to experience the fullness of a dance of attention.5 For all the challenges
of autism, this is not without joy.
“Everything [is] somewhat alive to me” (Krumins in Miller 2003, 86).
“Happiness to me was the immediateness of the environment” (Muk-
hopadhyay in Iversen 2006, 104).
A dance of attention is the holding pattern of an immersive, almost
unidentifiable set of forces that modulate the event in the immediateness
of its coming to expression. Attention not to, but with and toward, in and
around. Undecomposably.
“All the time shadows had to borrow the colors of the objects on which
they would fall,” writes autistic and poet Tito Mukhopadhyay. “And they
colored all objects in one universal color. That color is the color of a shadow,
which is a darker color on the borrowed color” (2008, 21). A colored shad-
owing: an intertwining of fields of emergent experience not yet defined
as this or that.6 Not defined as this or that, yet their qualities already inter-
act. The fields, in their immediacy, play off each other, lending their qual-
ities to each other, composing a single field of mutual action, of co-fusion
and changing contrast: co-motion. An immediate commotion of qualita-
tive texturing. A generative holding pattern already moving qualitatively
passages
5
toward an experience in the making. Colored shadow has emerged: a qual-

ity belonging to the compositional field. Not to its elements, but to the
immediacy of their mutual action.
The emergence continues. “I could now imagine how a shadow could
silence the interaction between other colors if those colors happened to
fall in the territory of its silence.” A hiatus forms in the commotion, made
of the same interacting qualities as the commotion. “I could see the night
jasmines wet with morning dew, lit with fresh sunshine, trying to form
a story with their jasmine-petal smell. I would see the story spread in the
air” (Mukhopadhyay 2008, 21–22). A new quality, a fragrance, arrives in
the hiatus. A flowering dances to attention as the event of this ingression.
Jasmine gathers the play of color and shadow around itself, transmuted
into an interplay of moisture and light. Light and moisture, in co-motion
with a smell. The fragrance of jasmine, in its interplay with moisture and
light, takes the relay from colored shadow as the predominant quality of
the compositional field as a whole. This relay brings the field to the verge
of determinate expression. In the field’s perfusion by smell, a story is trying
to form. The field is moving through its perfusion toward a recounting of
itself. It is striving to be taken into account.7 The flower has appeared as a
function of this striving. It is not a discrete object. The field of immediate
experience is not composed of objects. The flower is the relational conduit
for a field-wide tendency to expression. It might be called an objectile rather
than a fully bloomed object: a bud of an object. The field composes buds
of objects as a function of its appetition for expression.
The dance of attention evoked here by Mukhopadhyay is the attentive-
ness in the environment of an expressibility tending toward a determinate
expression yet to come. Caught in the middling of this event, Mukhopad-
hyay is not the maker of the scene. He attends to its dance, co-composing
with it. “I would see that the moment I put my shadow above the flow-
ers, the story would immediately stop forming” (2008, 22). The moment
he overshadows the field, imposing his presence on it, its activity stops.
Mukhopadhyay must remain co-present. Flower, shadow, story field-dance
to attention, in an indetermination of a coming to be determined, at the
very boundary between experiencing and imagining, in the moment,
yet untold.
“My boundary between imagining and experiencing something was a
very delicate one. Perhaps it still is. So many times I still need to cross-check
Co m i ng Ali ve i n a Wo rld of Te xt u re
6
with Mother, or someone who can understand my voice now, whether

an incident really happened around my body or presence” (Mukhopad-
hyay 2008, 22). Presence with, in, and around a budding field-becoming,
in patient attentiveness toward what the field wants. Uncertainty in the
aroundness: where does the body begin and end? Where is the relay
between imagination and experience? The coming to further expression
of the field in conversation, for cross-checking, moves the center of gravity
of the experience into another field, that of language. But this is poetic lan-
guage, not strictly fact seeking—a language for story, a language that holds
onto the tensile oscillation of imagining and experiencing, that composes
with the threshold of expressibility that was already active in the field, tun-
ing to expression where there is not yet either a fully bloomed object nor
a fully flowered subject—only the intensely experiencing-imagining bud
of a qualitative becoming toward making sense in language.
A dance of attention is not attentiveness of the human to the environ-
ment but attentiveness of the environment to its own flowering, at the very
limit where experience and imagination, immediacy and cross-checking,
overlap.8 The making-felt of a co-compositional force that does not yet
seek to distinguish between human and nonhuman, subject and object,
emphasizing instead an immediacy of mutual action, an associated milieu
of their emergent relation.
This co-compositional engagement with the associated milieu of emer-
gent relation is an environmental mode of awareness. It is a mode of exis-
tence integral, for autistics, to all aspects of experience. They do not
bemoan this modality of awareness as a deficit but affirm it as a mode of
existence intertwined tendentially with other modes of existence, such as
those (more “human” by the neurotypical definition) that are centered
on language.9
Autism activist Jim Sinclair writes, “Autism isn’t something a person has,
or a ‘shell’ that a person is trapped inside. There’s no normal child hidden
behind the autism. Autism is a way of being. It is pervasive; it colors every
experience, every sensation, perception, thought, emotion, and encounter,
every aspect of existence. It is not possible to separate the autism from the
person—and if it were possible, the person you’d have left would not be
the same person you started with” (1993). Persons come in many modes.
And persons become.
Autistic perception dances attention, affirming the interconnected-
ness of modes of existence, foregrounding the relationality at the heart
passages
7
of perception, emphasizing how experience unfolds through the matrix

of qualitative fields of overlap and emphasis already immediately mov-
ing toward expression in a dynamic field of becoming alive with co-
composition. For autistics, language comes late, and it is this that perhaps
marks most starkly their difference from neurotypicals. Neurotypical expe-
rience tends immediately to align to the beyond of the milieu of relation,
to an ulterior phase in which the flower stands alone, a solitary object sep-
arate from its shadow-stories. The separating out of the object backgrounds
the intrinsic relationality of the field’s coming to expression, clearing the
stage for an overshadowing human subject to cast his presence in its place,
in order to take personal credit for the field’s environmentally emergent
accounting for itself.10
Fielding and Affordance

“This notion of the environment,” says Whitehead, “introduces the notion
of the ‘more and less’, and of multiplicity” (1968, 7). The idea is not sim-
ply to turn the tables, and say that neurotypicals suffer from environment-
blindness owing to their focus on the human, and on the human-centric
use-value that the objectiles active in the environment may be cast for.
Neurotypicals also have environmental awareness, “more and less”: more
peripheralized, less often attended to in its own right. Conversely, most so-
called “low-functioning” autistics are not without language, as the quota-
tions in the previous section show, even though many are without spoken
language. “Not being able to speak is not the same as not having anything
to say,” reads one of the slogans of the Autistic Liberation Front.11 Despite
their initial focus on the qualitative relationality of emergent environ-
ments, autistics are also capable, more and less, depending on many fac-
tors, of perceiving “objectively.” By “objectively” we mean in a mode in
which focalized impacts, and their eventual uses and recountings in lan-
guage, single themselves out as particular affordances from the fielding of
the environment. We call this the mode of entrainment.12
Entrainment in relation to Mukhopadhyay’s flower-field would have
immediately placed the flowering within an efficient mode such as “pick-
ing” or “smelling.” That Mukhopadhyay’s experience is less of the flower
itself than of the field of flowering and shadowing and storying does
not suggest that he cannot also smell the flower or eventually differenti-
ate it from other affordances. What it suggests is that there is a tendency
within autism to immediately perceive the relational quality of a welling
8
environment that dynamically appears in a jointness of experience. This

foregrounding of the immediate field of experience we call entertainment.13
Entertainment is prior to the distinction between active and passive, sub-
ject and object.
Entertainment is captivation in a dance of attention. All experiential
fielding includes incipient entrainments and immediate entertainments.
It is a question of degree, and of mixture. The call to smell a flower upon
seeing it—the welling sense that a flower is for something, for smelling—is
a neurotypical response that is already moving toward grasping the flower
as an object against the environment as a background, even as the envi-
ronment is just coming to entertainment. For the neurotypical, the mode
of entertainment tends already to be saturated with entrainment. The field
of experience is pre-perfused with for-ness. It is already tending toward
expression in use-value—rather than entertaining expressibility on its own
account. For the autistic, the flower and the environment, entrainment and
entertainment, are not immediately separable. Flower and environment
are not reciprocally delimited as foreground and background, separable
object and surround, but feature jointly in co-activity. They co-feature as
tonal differences in a field modulating the whole of experience at all lev-
els, composing an overall mode of existence that is in a different key than
the neurotypical norm.
“Modes of existence are always plural and relational,” writes Etienne
Souriau: “existence can be found not only in beings, but between them”
(2009, 16). Modes of existence are intermodal. As defined by Souriau and
Gilbert Simondon (2005), modes of existence do not reify being by tak-
ing it as already constituted. They involve comings-to-existence through
singular events where objects are in the making. The modality of the
events’ singular coming-to-be is the existence. There is not an already-
constituted being that has the modality. The modality makes the being.
Modes of existence are not only intermodal, they are also plural in rela-
tion to themselves, each containing the others in germ, to a degree, as
an internal difference that is a compositional feature of its own textur-
ing.14 Each tends to want of the others. Modes of existence have an inbred
appetite for each other, and cannot easily sustain themselves separately,
try as they might sometimes.
The autism rights movement emphasizes the multiplicity of modes of
existence, under the term “neurodiversity.”15 They are not only signaling
the need to attend to the blooming of fields of relation from which neither
passages
9
predefined objects nor overshadowing subjects have yet to be singled out;

they are alerting us as well to the intricacies of perception across the spec-
trum. For neurotypicals are in fact neurodiverse, also immediately perceiv-
ing relation. The difference is the speed of subtraction of objects from the
total field, owing to the field’s pre-perfusion with entrainment. Under cer-
tain circumstances, neurotypicals themselves experience a predominance
of environmental awareness. It is rarely focused on, though, appearing
as an ephemeral interlude between more substantial-feeling affordances.
When environmental awareness does resurface, it is without fully bloomed
objects and overshadowing subjects, as autistics describe. But there is still
a degree of difference between this and other modes of existence on the
wider spectrum of neurodiversity. Because entrainment reigns as an imme-
diate tendency in neurotypicals, even when they are immersed in a self-
entertaining relational field, affordances already agitate, but are not yet
objectified. For the neurotypical standing in a grassy farmer’s field paint-
ing a flower, the flowering of experience may immediately present itself
for artistic rendering, as it does for autistics. But there will likely also be
an equally immediate sense of how the flower stands in relation to grass
and trees, including a tacit cartography of how to get from road to field
to flower and back, and what that trajectory might afford. This efficacious
orienting occurs directly as a field-effect, on the level of the objectile, not
on the level of constituted objects as such.
Ebb and Flow

You’re late, you’re hurrying from the subway to the office on a crowded
rush-hour sidewalk. Bodies all around, thicker and thinner, faster and
slower, in a complex ebb and flow. In the ebb and flow, temporary open-
ings come and go. Your perception is focused on the coming and going of
the openings, which correspond to no thing in particular. Each opening
is a field effect. It is an artifact of the moving configuration of the bodies
around you, factoring in their relative speeds, and their rates of accelera-
tion and deceleration as their paths weave around each other and around
obstacles. The opening is not simply a hole, a lack of something occupy-
ing it. It is a positive expression of how everything in the field, moving
and still, integrally relates at that instant. It is the appearance of the field’s
relationality, from a particular angle. The particular angle is that of your
body getting ahead. The opening is how the field appears as an affordance
for your getting-ahead. Your movement has to be present to the opening
10
as it happens. Wait, and the opening closes. Its perception and your mov-
ing into it must be one. There is no time to reflect, no time to focus, assess,
and choose. If you focus on one body over another, you see one body then
another—and not the opening in the field of movement they share. You
have to soften your focus, letting the field’s changing configuration dilate
to fill experience. You have to let what is normally your peripheral vision
take over, attending to everything in the “same way.”
The experience is then all movement-texture, complexly patterned,
full of change and transition, teemingly differentiated. You’re surfing the
crowd even as the crowd is surfing you. Despite the rush, this is not with-
out joy. You revel in the fluidity of your trajectory, without focusing on
it as a feeling-tone separate from the movement. You have performed an
integral dance of attention, seemingly without thinking.
But you were thinking, with your movement. Your every movement was
a performed analysis of the field’s composition from the angle of its affor-
dance for getting-ahead. Entering the dance of attention, your perceiving
converged with your moving activity, and your activity was your think-
ing. You entered a mode of environmental awareness in which to perceive
is to enact thought, and thought is directly relational. This actively rela-
tional thinking is also an expression of the field, but in a different mode
than storytelling, poetic or not, with no immediate need for language, sat-
isfying itself at a level with the body’s movements: expression a-bodying.
In retrospect, it will likely appear to you that the predominant object
singled out by your memory—the sidewalk—had been your affordance
from the subway to the office. In the office, cluttered with entraining
affordances—the computer for e-mailing, the phone for message check-
ing, the chair for sitting—objects will be in focus again. But in the mode
of environmental awareness that effectively got you to the office on time,
it was not the object “sidewalk” that afforded the last leg of your com-
mute. It was the fleeting openings, now forgotten. The openings are long
gone. The sidewalk remains. The stability of the sidewalk, its ability to re-
feature in experience from moment to moment, is an enabling condition
for the ephemerality of the openings. This is how what we single out as
objects figure for environmental awareness in the moment: as fused into a
field of movement, their stability entering into that field on equal footing,
as one contrast in its complex relational patterning.
Perhaps the difference between the environmental awareness of
the autistic and that of neurotypicals is that neurotypicals always fuse
passages
11
the entertainment of the environment with an immediate availing

themselves of affordances. The autistic becomes the field, integrally co-
compositional with it. For the neurotypical, the field comes already sat-
urated with affordances the field proposes, with openings or object-buds
offering themselves as conduits for the field’s coming expression, already
oriented efficaciously. This efficacious tendency in neurotypicals lends
the field more “naturally” to the kind of cross-checking that is for fact-
finding, rather than for story-making in a poetic sense, as it was in Muk-
hopadhyay’s case. For both neurotypicals and autistics, and all along the
spectrum of neurodiversity, it is only beyond the moment, with memory,
and with the retellings memory makes possible, that objects will stand out
clearly, sagely observing the boundary between experience and imagin-
ing. In the moment, they are fused with field effects that are moving and
ephemeral and at the threshold.
When the Field Dances

A mode of existence never preexists an event. The sittability of the chair in
your office does not preclude the chair becoming an affordance for sleep.
The mode of existence has to do with the emergent quality of the experi-
ence, not with the factually cross-checked identity of the objects featuring
in it. What is startling about the neurotypical is the capacity to background
the in-formation of the field, and to pre-subtract from the expressive poten-
tial of its relational complexity. No cartwheels in the classroom.
But what of the classroom? What of our neurotypical children who can-
not sit still as they are told how and what to learn? Where is that joy we
remember in their perpetually moving and ephemeral four-year-old bod-
ies before the classroom took over? What presuppositions exist in the very
notion of the neurotypical? The “epidemic” of “attention-deficit disorder”
rings alarm bells. Might not the diagnoses betray an inattention on the part
of adults to an attentiveness of a different order? One mode of existence’s
deficit may be another’s fullness.
Take this example of Mukhopadhyay’s. In the context of a classroom
much below his intellectual level, he is asked to add 4 + 2. When he
is seemingly incapable of following through with the task, the teacher
quickly comes to the conclusion that his intellect is deficient, assuming
that because Mukhopadhyay did not come up with the answer she had
expected, he is incapable of carrying through even the simplest of math-
ematical equations. Yet listen to how Mukhopadhyay relates the story:
12
I was wondering why the hell that 4 had to interact with the
number 2, through a + sign. [. . .] I looked at the number 2, won-
dering about the coordinate axes of the plane surface and the
probable coordinate points that 2 would hold. And as I saw the
position of 2 somewhere on the upper side of the page, I men-
tally assigned it with the coordinate points of 3 and 7. Three as
the x coordinate and 7 as the y coordinate. I could see the page
divided into graphic grids. I heard my aide saying something
like I needed to finish up my work. But I was busy assigning a
coordinate value to 4. Finally, I settled with the values of 3 and
9 as x and y coordinates. I gave a quick value to the addition
sign also. Then I found a whole story of number characters
other than merely 2 and 4, competing, quarreling, and assert-
ing themselves to be written down. Finally, I needed the help of
“average.” I took the average on the x side and the average on
the y side to bring peace among the numbers. (2008, 154–55)
Mukhopadhyay is in the thick of a number field of experience. Just as color,

shadow, and smell were in active interplay in the sunlit field, numbers are
in a commotion of relational activity, each vying to be written down, to be
the conduit of the field’s summing up in a determinate expression.
The lack of the expected outcome, that 4 + 2 = 6, clearly has less to do
with Mukhopadhyay’s capacity for reasoning than with a deficiency in
entrainment. This is a “deficiency” only in the sense that the summing
up of the field—the subtraction, from the fullness of its complexity, of a
particular product that stands out from it—takes more time because the
immediate field of experience does not come already oriented for efficacy.
The neurotypical approach is to jump as quickly as possible to the most
“reasonable” outcome, the one most easily cross-checkable factually. That
this “rationality” is a subtraction from the fielding of a much richer event
is rarely acknowledged. The event is too rarely perceived in the more or the
less of its sum, in the intensity of its emergent multiplicity.
For Mukhopadhyay, mathematics dances to attention in a way that
lends it to the relational force of its milieu. All manner of exotic, potential
outcomes vie. “What if a 2-dimensional point is added to a 4-dimensional
point?” Mukhopadhyay continues. “I saw the fourth time-vector coordi-
nate, leading the plane, in a clockwise motion, coming back every twelve
hours, in a 360 degree rotation. My day filled with all the exotic wonders
passages
13
that 2 + 4 could offer. I developed a very powerful 2 + 4 system, which

kept my mind and senses entertained for the rest of the day” (2008, 156).
The equation, it turns out, is much more than two numbers, a plus sign,
and an outcome—it is the generating of a field that modulates experience,
that entertains, that busies the body and absorbs attention, that creates a
panoply of sense. Mathematics is intrinsically related to the experience
of the day’s unfolding, to how the world gyrates with potential, to how
time itself works. It is not a discrete tool or task. It is a procedure integrally
entering into the “self-enjoyment”—to use a term from Whitehead—of
the environmental field.
The Gateway Called Moment

Just as language comes late, speedy equation-solving also comes late. The
event, intensified by the field effects of relational potential, entrains as an
afterthought. This leaves the commotional complexity of the moment
in gyration. “Moments could get out of control,” Mukhopadhyay writes,
“when they became unpredictable and too large for my senses to accumu-
late all that they involved within their field. One moment, you may look at
a picture, and at the same time you are aware of the pink wall around the
picture, you are also aware of Jack’s voice explaining something about
the picture. The very next moment you are looking at the reflection through
its glass frame, which is competing for attention while you are looking at
the picture. You may see a part of the room reflected in the glass, and you
may be so absorbed in the reflection that you may not hear anything from
Jack’s voice because you suddenly discover that those reflections are con-
spiring to tell you a story. Jack’s voice may float in that story as big or small
bubbles” (2008, 52–53). Voice and reflections in a struggle to define the
predominant experiential register of the event, voice vying to background
reflection, reflection endeavoring to encompass voice as a bubbling par-
cel of itself. This is the experience of a conversation for Mukhopadhyay.
Immersion in the activity of the field, alive with competing tendencies to
sort itself out. The focus is less on what might typically be assumed to be
the “content” of the conversation than on its dynamic form: the perfor-
mative tendencies enacting the event of its self-relating. The playing out
of the tendencies is what sorts out the field. “Moments are defined by
what your senses are compelled to attend to,” Mukhopadhyay continues.
“A moment may include a shadow of Jack’s chair falling on the floor or a
14
pen peeping out from the pile of papers, perhaps wishing to have a voice
so that it could say aloud, ‘Here I am! Here I am!’” (2008, 52–53). The cry
of expression already sounds in the field. The field is already expressing a
tendency toward something singling-out. Even now, in the immediacy of
the moment, something is already calling out for the right to stand out,
efficaciously or poetically—it is not yet clear.
Note that in Mukhopadhyay’s recounting, the moment is the subject.
The subject of the experience is not the human but the fielding of the
event itself. The human element alone is not sufficient to account for
the field’s activity. Instead of a pre-composed subject standing over and
above the event, overshadowing the moment, we have a vying commo-
tion of co-activity. The dynamic form of that co-activity coming toward
expression is what Whitehead calls the “subjective form” of the event. In
Mukhopadhyay’s account, the moment’s subjective form is as yet unre-
solved. It quivers still in the disquiet of the intensely resonant field. The
problem of the moment is how the commotion will sort out: which reg-
ister of field-effect will stand out, having most forcefully expressed itself
vis-à-vis the others. Only once this shakedown occurs will the determinate
content of the event be defined as predominantly a reflecting or a convers-
ing, a shadowing or a penning.
This brings to mind William James’s work on the pen in relation to con-
sciousness. James writes,
This pen is . . . in the first instance, a bald that [. . .] To get
classed either as a physical pen or as someone’s percept of a
pen, it must assume a function. . . . So far as in that world it is a
stable feature, holds ink, marks paper and obeys the guidance
of the hand, it is a physical pen. [. . .] So far as it is instable . . .
coming and going with the movements of my eyes, altering
with what I call my fancy, continuous with subsequent experi-
ences of its “having been” (in the past tense), it is the percept
of a pen in my mind. Those peculiarities are what we mean by
being “conscious” in a pen. (1996, 123–24)
In a pen? “Here I am! Here I am!” screams Mukhopadhyay’s pen. I am in

the moment; put the moment in me! Pen the moment!
In James, the moment is the gateway to a conscious experience of a
determinate kind: a pen experience in a world of definite use-value. The
passages
15
pen in fact double features. It alternates between two roles. Grasp it from
the angle of entrainment, from the angle of what it can do—“hold ink,
mark paper, obey the guidance of the hand”—and it emerges as a stable
physical object as opposed to being a percept. Humor it in the ephemeral-
ity of its self-entertainment—in the way it “comes and goes,” self-relating,
“continuous with subsequent experiences of its having been”—and the
pen emerges as a percept. What we call the cognitive relation is in fact a
pattern of the pen emerging alternately as physical or as percept, across dif-
ferent moments. The pen can only do this double cognitive duty because
“in the first instance,” in the singularity of each and every moment’s come
and go, it was an indeterminate field-effect: a “bald that” (not yet a this
or that). In this uncertainty of fielding, consciousness is already dawning,
but has not blossomed into a fully formed cognition. The pen, as White-
head would say, is already cognizable, but not yet finally cognized. It is
as yet but a cognizable factor in field experience. When the moment has
penned itself into a determinate emergence, consciousness begins to flicker.
It is holding “pen” and its use-value distinctly in the foreground, in a now
object-centered experience. The field is no longer saturated with entrain-
ment, but is heavy with it, locally. The singled-out object “pen” bears all
the weight of it. Field-wide entertainment, its integral relationality, has
been backgrounded. But the foreground only stands out because it has a
background to stand out from. Background and foreground are in mutual
embrace, the backgrounded activity still vying for attention. Consciousness
flickers with the tension between backgrounded environmental awareness
and foregrounded cognition. Cognition is the impossibility of grasping the
field in all of its cognizable effects. This is what it means to be conscious
“in” a pen, as opposed to be cognizant “of” it. It means to be conscious in
a commotional becoming-penfield.
In Mukhopadhyay’s case it is that the pen’s call—“Here I am! Here
I am!”—remains interwoven with Jack’s laughter rather than distinctly
taking the fore. “And within the same moment,” Mukhopadhyay con-
tinues, “there may be a sudden sound of laughter that can dissolve the
stories told by the reflections and the sullen silence of the chair’s shadow
with its demanding noise, making you wonder which part of the funny
story from Jack’s voice you missed listening to while you were watching
the giant blades of the fan pushing out every story and sound away from
it with air” (2008, 53). Instead of immediately tuning to what Whitehead
calls cognition’s “small focal region of clear illumination,” the event here
16
gives equal billing to the field of the cognizable, what for the fully formed
cognition will remain a “large penumbral region of experience which
tells of intense experience in dim apprehension”—flickeringly remind-
ing us that that apparent “simplicity of clear consciousness is no measure
of the complexity of complete experience” (1978, 267). In the moment, “in”
the pen might just was well have been “in” the blades, or “in” the laughter.
It all depends on how the commotion cognitively shakes down in the end.
Even at the cognitive end of the experience, the “large penumbral region”
of experience still flickers with what might just as well have been. It is the
remaining refuge of experience’s variety.
Variations
Experience’s variety does not preclude the efficacy of use; it includes it dif-
ferently. Take Mukhopadhyay’s experience of the door. He writes, “The
color comes and then the shape and then the size, the whole thing needs
time to get integrated. To be described as a door, there is position, the open
or closed” (in Iversen 2006, 237). When Mukhopadhyay sees the “door”
he does not immediately see a threshold for passage, as a neurotypical per-
son might. He sees qualities in a texture of integral experience. Color fields
first, and from that interplay, shape asserts itself. Here I am! Then with
shape comes size. This relay of emergence is now ready to be described as
a door. Only now does it have position, only now does it afford passage.
As it becomes determinate, an object form separates out from the dynamic
form, an affordance opens, and the tendency for describing makes itself
felt, tuning to language. The field has pressed on toward expressing itself in
language. The field of emergence is ready to tell its story. Mukhopadhyay
does see the door, and its doorness does allow it to function for crossing
through, and this affordance is expressible in language. But it all takes time.
It takes time for the field of experience to actively sort itself out toward its
coming to determinate expression.
To a neurotypical, something qualitatively different tends to occur
in the same field. Because going through a door is such a habitual experi-
ence, the crossing is likely to occur as if automatically, without the inter-
play of qualities, their relay, the emergence of door, and the opening of
the affordance even registering. Doorness disappears. The door figures as
always-already passed through, habitually. Any description of it will have
to be a reconstitution, the event coming toward expression in language
from the field of memory rather than from the field of immediacy. This is
passages
17
yet another variation, in addition to environmental awareness and cogni-

tion and their flicker: that of reflective consciousness. Reflective conscious-
ness is a variation on the neurotypical—underlining the point made earlier
that every mode of existence, including the neurotypical, is in fact neuro-
diverse, intermodal in its internal composition.
“What happens if the position changes, if, say, we close the door?”
Portia Iversen asks Mukhopadhyay. “It may disrupt the whole thing, and
you may need to start once again,” he responds (Iverson 2006, 238). The
tendency toward objecthood, affordance, and linguistic expression has to
return to the field and start again from the “bald that” of the moment.
The key difference between the autistic and the neurotypical is that the
neurotypical does not explicitly need to start over at every moment.
The neurotypical always has at the ready a kind of experiential shorthand
with which to abridge the event: habit. The neurotypical has at the ready
a procedure for reconstituting something after the fact from the phases of
experience’s fielding whose immediate entertainment was skipped: the pro-
cedure of reflective consciousness. The shortening of experience by habit
and its reconstitution by reflection go neurotypically hand in hand with
the greatest of fluidity. What falls out between habit and reflection, leav-
ing a gap they work in concert to smooth over with the aid of language
coming from the field of memory, is the coming alive of the field of expe-
riential immediacy, in its emergent dance of attention.16
Chunking
Anne Corwin, self-described engineer, science geek, cat appreciator, hyper-
lexic infovore, and maker of various and random quasi-functional objects,
explains how entering a room is different for an autistic:
I would probably walk into the room and see “check patterns”
before even being able to identify the door as a door and the
tablecloth as a tablecloth! [. . .] The process of “resolving pat-
terns and shapes and forms into familiar objects” is actually a
semi-conscious one for me. [. . .] I often tend to sit on floors
and other surfaces even if furniture is available, because it’s a
lot easier to identify “flat surface a person can sit on” than it
is to sort the environment into chunks like “couch,” “chair,”
“floor,” and “coffee table.” [. . .] There is much more. There is
always more. (2008)17
18
It is no doubt easier to habitually cross into a room that itself habitually

chunks into chairs and tables, than to begin with the whole-field pattern
as yet unresolved into objects. Rather than chunking, what occurs on
the autistic spectrum of neurodiversity is an immediate entertainment
of modalities of relation. Pattern, an interplay of contrasts, comes before
familiar use and describable chunking.
The neurotypical approach backgrounds this modulation of relational
emphases by subtracting from the emergent environment that which
is not immediately suited to its use. In the case of a dinner party, upon
entering a foreign dining room, the neurotypical will likely align to the
entrainments of chair-sittability and table-eatability before even fully not-
ing the checkedness of the field. In another context—painting the kitchen,
for instance—chairness will shift automatically to laddering, upsetting any
notion that entrainment is unvarying. What is unvarying about entrain-
ment is that it is always emphasis-by-subtraction. In yet another context, say
creating an art installation in the kitchen, the affordances of entrainment
get backgrounded. Entertainment takes over, now with a richly textured
relational emphasis co-involving field-effects of color, light and surface, pat-
tern and contrast, the whole characterized by an overall field quality of
airiness or crampiness, convivial freshness or the staleness of familial con-
striction. The field of immediacy reappears for itself, in its own qualitative-
relational terms. It will sort out one way or another, but in the moment
there always will have been much more.
The “much more, always more” of Corwin’s entering a room sug-
gests that the challenge for autism lies with the “less” of subtraction.
The room is immediately experienced in its always-more, each chunk-
ing an achievement, a new adventure in experience coming alive toward
expression.
“I taught myself to read at three,” Amanda Baggs relates, “and I had to
learn it again at ten, and yet again at seventeen, and at twenty-one, and at
twenty-six. The words that it took me twelve years to find have been lost
again, and regained, and lost, and still have not come all the way back to
where I can be reasonably confident they’ll be there when I need them. It
wasn’t enough to figure out just once how to keep track of my eyes and
ears and hands and feet all at the same time; I’ve lost track of them and
had to find them over and over again” (2010d).
passages
19
Against Neuroreductionism
The “neuro” is everywhere in the air today. Neuroarchitecture, neuroaes-
thetics, neurocriticism. We have advanced the term “neurodiversity” here
in order to problematize the “neuro” no less than the “typical.” Certain
of today’s neurocurrents, those informed by embodied cognition and its
younger offspring enactive perception, converge in some respects with the
account developed here. We are uneasy, however, with the general excite-
ment generated by recent advances in brain imaging technology, which
have been met with another wave of the cyclic craze for finding neural
“correlates” of experiential events. The models, admittedly, are vastly more
complex than earlier paradigms of localization, nuanced as they are with
notions of systemic feedback, distributed networks, and emergent patterning
of neural activity. In spite of these very real advances, the problem remains
for us that the impulse to identify an experiential event with a brain state
tends to take precedence, and is too often given the first and last word.
Approaches opposed to this cerebral reductionism, such as embodied
cognition and enactive perception, often appeal to phenomenology in
order to restore the experiential field’s fullness. For our part, we cannot
follow this line, because for phenomenology the field of immediate expe-
rience is always-already subjective or, to be more precise, “pre-subjective”
(in the sense of already imbued with specifically human meaning just wait-
ing to be “disclosed,” or translatable from the status of “implicit knowl-
edge” into an explicit schema).18 For us, as for autistics, this isn’t the case.
We approach the field of experience as “pure,” in William James’s sense of
being neither subjective nor objective yet—yet ready to be both or either,
more and less, multiplicitously. Whatever human meaning an experience
has, whatever schema it exhibits, it has achieved them, as an adventure
of integrally renewed self-composition and emergent variation, starting
always all over again from the “bald” commotional “that” of the gateway
that is moment. This forbids appealing to phenomenology as a corrective
to our discomfort with neuroreductionism.
From the perspective developed here, the notion of neural correlates—
the idea that experiential events “correspond” to brain states—errs in pre-
supposing the dichotomy between the determinately physical and the
fickly perceptual. In our account, following James and Whitehead, this dis-
tinction takes form on the highly derived level of reflective consciousness,
20
which is itself predicated on the subtractive emergence of cognition from

a richer and more encompassing field of coming experience. The search
for neural correlates glosses over the immediacy of the field of experience,
its phased becomings and variations, its flickerings, its constant reminders
that the simplicity of clear consciousness is no measure of the complexity
of complete experience. The search for neural correlates glosses over this
intensity and complexity in theory, while in practice it constantly returns
to it without acknowledging that move.
The surreptitious appeal by neuroscientists to the total field is a practi-
cal necessity. A correlation between an experiential event and a brain state
cannot be established without eliciting an experiential event from which
a brain image can be extracted. Subjects are shown particular images, or
inducted into certain kinds of activity, or induced into certain affective
orientations. A mapping of brain activity is then extracted from the event
by the imaging technology. The predominant experiential characteristics
of the context from which the image has been extracted—a visual per-
ception of a certain type, the execution of a particular category of act, an
affective priming of a certain cast—is then set against the brain state. The
brain state is construed as the physical/objective/bodily side of the event,
and the predetermined experiential characteristics of the context are con-
strued as the perceptual/subjective/phenomenal side. Nonetheless, how-
ever the correlation is construed philosophically, it tends to be lopsided.
The physical side tends to be treated as explanatory of the perceptual side.
This reduces the perceptual/subjective/phenomenal to the status of an
epiphenomenon. Even interpretations that tie the two sides together with
a model of emergence cannot escape the explanatory lopsiding inherent
in attributing epiphenomenal status to the phenomenal. The physical/
objective/bodily comes out as more “real.” Inherent to every “discovery”
of a correlation there is a valorizing of the determinately physical pole,
since the entire setup is designed precisely in order to extract this side of
the event.19 The technology used is custom-made precisely for that. The
whole exercise is angled toward the emphasis-by-subtraction of the phys-
ical from the experimental context.
To put it another way, the laboratory setup always reenters its project
of explanatory modeling through the gateway called moment. An event
is triggered. However controlled the context, there are always minor ele-
ments considered peripheral to the predominant type, category, or cast of
the context to which the brain state will be correlated. The contribution
passages
21
of these active ingredients to the total field falls out. It is designed-out by

the way in which the experimental setup is pre-oriented toward the articu-
lation of a certain kind of result. This is no small thing, because among the
ingredients designed-out as “negligible” are a whole panoply of relational-
field effects, which from the point of view of the environmental aware-
ness we have been talking about are absolutely integral to the genesis of
the event. The experimental procedure systematically subtracts them, in
order to emphasize the contribution of the brain, to the extent that it can
be reduced to the physical.20
We are not saying that this has no value. Our point is that the activity of
neurons enters the event on an equal footing with other ingredients: from
the angle of neurons’ ability to co-compose relational field-effects. Alone,
they are nothing. Together with other ingredients, which are of every con-
ceivable determinable nature, the neurons vie to have their “voice” heard
most loudly in the way in which the event moves toward expression. Take
me! Take me! The neuroscientist takes them happily—without realizing
that it is when the neuronal as such is most determining of the outcome of
the event that the event is operating at its most automatic.21 The “physical”
is in fact a limit-state of the habitual, its extreme. Much goes into making
a habit besides electrical impulses and chemical signals. A whole world of
relationality enters into it, subtractively. The physical as automatic-habitual
is a subtractive limitation of the dance of attention of the field of experi-
ence. Extracting it from the field is adding subtraction to subtraction, carry-
ing the emphasis-by-subtraction of habit to a higher power. This is exactly
what makes neurocentric modeling so useful therapeutically: it isolates the
subtractive limit of the field of experience’s functioning. At the limit of that
limit lies the pathological: when the automaticity of the physical takes over
to the point of undermining the use-value of habit on other levels of the
relational world. The whole setup is contrived as a function of the patho-
logical. That is our point: the neuro is inherently a therapeutic concept
contrived with and for the pathological—which is to say that it is guided
by an a priori commitment to a presupposed, quantifiable, base-state dis-
tinction between the normal and the pathological. No matter what kind
of philosophical calisthenics are performed around it, the neuro remains
profoundly neurotypical.
There is no doubt that autistics’ brains are “wired” differently. There
is the possibility that this difference may be “cured.” Our point is that
while the neuro has therapeutic value, it only has explanatory value to
22
the extent to which the composing of experience can be reduced to its

physical pole. In other words, in the expanded context of the whole-field
approach proposed here, it has limited explanatory value. In the moment,
the immediate field of experience is self-explaining in the way it complexly
plays out, composing a self-expressive outcome for itself. From moment
to moment, experience explains itself in the variations on its expressive
outcomes. Its self-explaining always starts from qualitative field-effects,
like colored shadow. Its outcomes always have an overall qualitative color,
or affective tonality. The field of experience is best described as relational-
qualitative, not physical or perceptual, or some correlated combination of
these. The question of “curing” modes of existence such as autism must
be situated on this relational-qualitative ground. It is not just a therapeutic
question. It is a question of the diversity of modes of existence, and of the
modes of thought they enact, and of the varieties of expressive outcomes
they compose, and of the differing determinations of experience those out-
comes instantiate in the world. The question of curing is not as direct as it
might seem. It is in fact an ecological question concerning how diversities
co-inhabit the same field of becoming-human and co-compose.22 Perhaps
the field can be cured—of the neurotypical devaluing of autistic experience.
DJ Savarese, writing in the crushingly overmedicalized United States,
polemically makes this point in terms of “freedom,” playing the conven-
tional political rhetoric of his country of birth against its tendency toward
therapeutic overkill:
The great United States of America is breathtakingly not free.

Equality is not as sacred because not everyone has access to it.
Freedom is not as available as many people think. First, free
people treat my people, very smart people who type to commu-
nicate, as mindless. Second, they underestimate us as very bad
instead of reaching out to us. The creators of everyone’s very
important Declaration of Independence wasted their breath.
(Ralph Savarese 2007, 417)
What we have endeavored to help draft, co-composing with writers like

DJ Savarese, Amanda Baggs, and Tito Mukhopadhyay, is a Declaration of
Independence from neuroreductionism for all.
passages
A Perspective of
the Universe
Alfred North Whitehead

M e e t s A r a k awa a n d G i n s
Preoperation
It is certain that all bodies whatsoever, though they have no sense, yet
they have perception . . . and whether a body be alterant or altered,
evermore a perception precedeth operation; for else all bodies would be
alike to one another.
—francis bacon (in Whitehead 1967b, 68–69)
Taking Account
“There is an apportioning out that can register and an apportioning out
that happens more indeterminately” (Arakawa and Gins 2002, 5).1 The
apportioning out that can register is sense, meaning “cognition: appre-
hension.” The apportioning out that happens more indeterminately is
a perception preceding cognitive operation. Apprehension without the
“ap-” and with the emphasis on the new first syllable: prehension. It all
begins with an uncognitive taking account of an as-yet-indeterminate
apportioning out (Whitehead 1967b, 69). Difference is founded upon this
preoperation (“else all bodies would be alike”). A body comes into its own
already finding itself in a difference-making taking-account. As yet it can
have no sense whether it is alterant or altered. “Half-abstracted from the
start” (AG 2002, 51). And yet it is already in the process of landing. In
an “underlying activity of realization individualizing itself” (Whitehead
1967b, 70).
23
24
Modal Location
Perhaps it is simply too early to make a concrete distinction between
alterant and altered, affecting and affected-by. For the underlying activity
is a push that pulls. The body is pushed into a taking-account already in
process, and this pulls it toward a self-individualizing realization. Not yet
one or the other, agent or patient, the body is finding itself in an undisen-
tangleable “interlocking of modes” (Whitehead 1967b, 70). Bare activity.2
Every site is a prehensive interlocking of reciprocal modes in bare activ-
ity. There is no “simple location” (Whitehead 1967b, 69–71). The smile
spreads over the face, as the face fits itself onto the smile (Whitehead 1967b,
71). The couch fits itself to the body, as the body spreads itself over the
couch. The fit is already apportioning this double potential the instant
the couch is perceived, even at an uncomfortable distance. In the underly-
ing activity of every perception, there is one two-way movement of recip-
rocal interfusion already incipiently, actively taking account. “Our body
penetrates the sofa on which it sits; and the sofa penetrates our body”
(Boccioni 1970, 28). “What emanates from bodies and what emanates
from architectural surrounds intermix” (AG 2002, 61). A modal location
is a field of experience.
Agency and Patience

Body and sofa “take hold and hold forth” (AG 2002, 9). To take hold is to
show agency. To hold oneself forth for what will come is to show patience.
The landing site’s prehension interfuses agency and patience, indissolubly
alterant-altering. “Distinguishing between subject and object should be
avoided” (AG 2002, 49).
Beyond Simple Location

“That which is being apportioned out is in the process of landing” (AG
2002, 5). The site is in the process of apportioning itself out as the body is
apportioning itself to it. The site lands itself for the body as much as the
body lands the site. The site stretches between in a single, two-way move-
ment of potential. Do not presume to know concretely where the person
who makes architectural-body sense lies. She lies in the field of her poten-
tial. “We cannot define where a body begins and where external nature
ends” (Whitehead 1968, 21).
passages
25
Potential Is the Stream

Potential is the stream one can enter twice. But “no two moments have
identical streams in which to rest a weary foot.” Reciprocally, “no two
moments offer up an identical foot.” “Nothing stays in place as place but
flux” (AG 2002, 4).
Fielding Potential
“Landing sites abound within landing sites” (AG 2002, 9). The architectural
surround is a crisscross field of many streams. A field of nested abundance.
It does not begin with a form. It does not begin with a figure–background
configuration. It begins as a populated field of alterant-altering interfusion.
Agencies-patiencies abound for the apportioning. For anything in particu-
lar to happen, a particular expanse must be taken: “The taking of a partic-
ular expanse to be a landing site happens in a flash” (AG 2002, 9). Having
been taken to be, the landing site now is. To be is to be had in a flash.
Pulses of Persons
To be is to be had in a flash. “These events are decision-like” (AG 2002, 9).
A portion of field potential has been had. The sofa’s holding forth has been
taken hold of. Its perceptual activity disappears in the taking of comfort.
Seated comfort stands out from the background. It takes the foreground,
where it will figure as being the experience. The field is now configured. Its
event has taken form. The sofa rests in the background, patient provider
of plush. Agent and patient have separated out. Subject and object. Person
and thing. The architectural body has fielded its potential into personable
form. This happens in a flash and “is over in a flash.” No sooner is the form
taking decided than it “yields to whatever can come next” (AG 2002, 9).
Back into the stream. Taking, yielding; figuring, backgrounding; potential
resolved, potential returned; taking place and staying in flux. Personing
pulses with field potential. At each pulse it draws the field’s abundance into
a unifying standpoint. That standpoint expresses a decision-like event in
the currency of affect: comfort. An affective value is a selective expression.
It is a qualitative translation of a modal location.
Taking Place
The taking form of decision-like events is a taking place. A position is the
standpoint the affective translation of a modal location sits itself into,
A Pe r sp e c t i ve of t h e Un i ve r se
26
assigns itself as a site. But “assigned positions quickly lose ground: one
moment’s nearground slips into the next’s farground” (AG 2002, 71).
Consciousness Flickers
In the pulsing of the person, “consciousness flickers; and even at its bright-
est, there is a small focal region of clear illumination, and a large penumbral
region of experience which tells of intense experience in dim apprehension.
The simplicity of clear consciousness is no measure of the complexity of
complete experience” (Whitehead 1978, 267).
Rhythm, History, Life

“There is a rhythm of process whereby creation produces natural pulsation,
each pulsation forming a natural unit of historic fact.” These “transitions
of history exhibit forms of order.” “The essence of life,” however, “is to be
found in the frustrations of established order.” Life’s “aim is at novelty of
order” (Whitehead 1968, 88). Does taking comfort qualify as life? Only if
it flickers. Is taking comfort death? Yes, if it stays in place.
A Perspective of the Universe

“The things which are grasped into a realized unity, here and now, are
not the castle, the cloud, the planet, [and the sofa] in themselves; but they
are the castle, the cloud, the planet [and the sofa] from the standpoint of
the prehensive [affective] unification. In other words, it is the standpoint
of the [sofa] over there from the standpoint of the unification here. It is,
therefore, aspects of the castle, the cloud, the planet [and the sofa] which
are grasped into unity here” (Whitehead 1967b, 70). This is a perspective.
But it is not a perspective on a portion of the universe. It is a “perspective
of the universe” (Whitehead 1968, 66, 79, 89). Each realization figures itself
out against the background of its own unification, but that figuring holds
its unity in simultaneous contrast with an endless abundance of potentiali-
ties of alternate realizations (Whitehead 1968, 91). Its foregrounding of itself
configures itself to them. It figures with them, implicitly. Each decision-like
event comes into its own individuality with an infinity of alternate forms.3
“It expresses its own nature as being this, and not that . . . combined with
the sense of modes of infinitude stretching beyond its own limitations.” In
this sense, it implicitly “expresses its necessary relevance beyond its own
limitations. It expresses a perspective of the universe” (Whitehead 1968,
108). Its standpoint is a region of the world’s potential, flickeringly taking
passages
Arakawa and Gins, Ubiquitous Site * Nagi’s Ryoanji * Architectural Body.
View to the West, Nagi Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan, 1994
28
place. It tells of intense experience nested in the larger penumbral region

of dimmer experience. It is a perspective of experience, in the same sense
in which it is a perspective of the universe. The world is landing sites within
landing sites; regions of experience within larger experience. The world is
the larger of the experiences. It is of experience, for larger or for smaller.
Every experience is a worlding. To land is to world.
Refrain
“It is certain that all bodies whatsoever, though they have no sense, yet
they have perception . . . and whether a body be alterant or altered, ever-
more a perception precedeth operation; for else all bodies would be alike
to one another” (Francis Bacon in Whitehead 1967b, 68–69). Bodies what-
soever, “a taking shape of surrounds” (AG 2002, 4). Bodies whatsoever in
the any-space-whatever of landing, less a body as such than a bodying-
forth. Bodyings forth as instants of existence, as organisms that person, as
architectings of mobility. Bodies whatsoever because they “would be alike
to one another.” Whatsoever because in excess, always, of this or that pre-
constituted body: organisms that person take account, field forth, appor-
tion out, bodies in the making.
“Any one instance of existence involves the notion of other existences,
connected with it and yet beyond it” (Whitehead 1968, 7). Bodies in the
making not as humans already existing but as perceptions on the cusp of
environmentality, an ecological becoming. “This notion of the environ-
ment introduces the notion of ‘more and less,’ and of multiplicity” (White-
head 1968, 7). Prehending not as perceiving before the world, but as the
push-pull of the withness of worlding.
Preoperation, a preacceleration agitating in potentia. Preoperation, how
the many become one. “Perceptual landing sites occur always in sets—a
flock of birds flying in formation” (AG 2002, 10). To land perceptually
is to field-with in agitation, it is to become-body in a preoperation that
subtracts for a tending that apportions out. Organisms-that-person agitate
in the mix, but always in a withness of environment: a becoming ecology
of practices.
Whatsoever activity, bare activity: “A perspective of the universe.” Pre-
hension as a fielding of the milieu in its unfolding, resolving into an occa-
sion, the occasion conditioned by an affording for or a being taken account
of. A perspective of the universe is a lure. “The world always gets in our
way as still more world” (AG 2002, xii). An alluring moreness. Emergence
passages
29
in the milieu of the between, an architectural surround is a conjoint trans-

formation, a relational dynamic. “Her fielding of her surroundings never
ceases, continuing even in sleep” (AG 2002, 7). A dance of attention of the
bare activity of becomings coalescing into a coming event. Preoperation
in an “underlying activity of realization individualizing itself” (Whitehead
1967b, 70). Organism that persons not as a human body so much as a push
that pulls across matters of fact. “Each instant is only a way of grouping
matters of fact” (Whitehead 1968, 146). Each instant, a landing site for
a taking place. Each taking place a prehensive interlocking of reciprocal
modes. Matter of fact: the thisness of takings place, the thisness of archi-
tecting that world.
Thisness: a flocking. A quality of experience that folds the many in the
one, an interfusing of agency and patience, indissolubly alterant-altering.
“A tentative constructing toward a holding in place,” not of the one, but
of the polyphony of potential: Do not presume to know concretely where
the person who makes architectural-body sense lies. She lies in her poten-
tial. A flocking toward concrescence: the many in the one.
Tweaked toward “the what happens next? of life” (AG 2002, 42–43), con-
crescence is a taking of subjective form. Its forces converge into a thisness
of experience that immediately interfuses with events in the making. To be
is to be had in a flash. “The organism-that-persons drags its whole world
along as a pull-toy” (AG 2002, 3). Organism that persons: “a local agitation
that shakes the whole universe” (Whitehead 1968, 133). A populated field
of alterant-altering interfusion.
An organism-that-persons: a perspective, a populated field of alterant-
altering interfusion that lands sometimes narrowly, sometimes widely.
“Feeling is the agent which reduces the universe to its perspective for
fact. Apart from gradations of feeling, the infinitude of detail produces
an infinitude of effect in the constitution of each fact” (Whitehead 1968,
10). Feeling, a perspective of the universe, a taking, a yielding; a figuring, a
backgrounding. Feeling, how perspective concresces. Feeling, how impor-
tance fields. Feeling, the germ of expression where the many become one
and are increased by one (Whitehead 1978, 21).
“Importance passes from the World as one to the World as many”
(Whitehead 1968, 20). Importance, a taking-shape of surrounds that
activates the thisness of life in the making, push-pulling into resonance
the agitations of potential. Importance, how “perspective is imposed upon
A Pe r sp e c t i ve of t h e Un i ve r se
30
the universe of things felt” (Whitehead 1968, 1). Dynamic relation, where
process occasions.
The universe of things felt: potential resolved, potential returned. Con-
sciousness flickers.
Collective individuation in the milieu of expression. “Expression is the
gift from the World as many to the World as one” (Whitehead 1968, 20). A
multiplicity in the affective tuning, a background-foregrounding that oscil-
lates as vibratory intensity from importance to expression, from expression
to importance. “Complexity, vagueness and compulsive intensity” (White-
head 1968, 72). Life-living as relational fielding that architects mobility,
life-living as how the world worlds, across individuals, across species and
scales, tending, always, toward the flickering. No once-and-for-all of con-
sciousness: consciousness in the interstices of manys and ones.
Preoperation
It is certain that all bodies whatsoever, though they have no sense, yet
they have perception . . . and whether a body be alterant or altered,
evermore a perception precedeth operation; for else all bodies would be
alike to one another.
—Francis Bacon
passages
Just Like That
W i l l i am F o r s y t h e :
B e tw e e n M o v e m e n t a n d La n g u a g e
In 2001, the Forsythe Company created Woolf Phrase,1 a piece conceived

from Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway, generated, as Forsythe says, by
“moving around the rhythm of Woolf’s language” (Sulcas 2001). From its
conception, the piece is about movement and language coming together
and in relay. Its project: to make a movement phrase of the movement of
Woolf’s phraseology.
The piece begins and ends in a recurrent circling that asks us to encoun-
ter how language opens itself to movement and how movement co-
composes with this opening. Refrains return again and again: “just like
that,” “somehow,” “all of a sudden,” “PAAF!” as the piece circles the twist-
ing of bodies around the mewling of a sea gull, the barking of dogs, the
buzzing of bees, the surging of waves. These refrains haunt the piece, and
echo beyond it. When we would leave the rehearsals, they would follow
us. We would find ourselves reperforming what we had just participated
in as spectators. At any moment, we would catch ourselves parsing our
actions and comments with a just like that. PAAF! We would sound to a
hand gesture recurring from the dance, punctuating the passage from this
moment to the next.
What is it, in a work of dance, that gives it this capacity to linger, to
reactivate itself, contagiously, beyond its own duration? What is it, in
the techniques mobilized by the Forsythe Company, that is capable of
agitating language to the limit so that it begins to move, movement recip-
rocating by taking on the inflections of language?
Here we take up the refrain again, hoping to restage the contagion in
writing.
31
32
Somehow, Seashore
Two dancers. She comes from the left, at the back of the stage, dancing a
circular movement, her gestures roll, repetitive, a mewling of a sea gull ema-
nating from the movement. Movement rolling, returning, ending where
it rebegins, wrapping around a vocalization.
He comes from the right, stands at the microphone and pauses, allow-
ing her movement to settle into its never-ending rebeginning. And then
he speaks: Somehow . . . music. The space fills with an undulating
sound wall, catching the mewling of the sea gull in its rising. Somehow,
he words, somehow seashore. At words’ end, a movement cuts in. He
gestures to the left, in the direction of the mewling, musically enwrapped.
Somehow, somehow, collectively beginning, collecting, fall-
ing. Somehow suspended in midair. Just like that. He gestures
again. Just like this. He falls, tumbling into the recesses of the rising
sound space.2
Somehow . . . music. Forsythe Company composer Thom Willems has
created a sound surround. As Forsythe says, Willems gives the performers
an “acoustic space to dance” (Forsythe 2003a). The undulating of the music
is the space of the movement. The piece takes place in this rhythmic space,
more so than on the stage. The stage is just the launching pad. Everything
that will be seen, heard, sounded, spoken, gestured, and evoked will collect
in the rhythmic milieu hovering above, wrapping around.3 Everything will
belong to it, everything will collect in it, swaddled together in its undu-
lations. For everything has rhythm, and rhythms have a way of coming
together. They resonate and accrue. Twists and turns and turns of phrase,
inflections of movement and of language, will assemble and accrete, to
compose this piece. Just like that.
From the first moment, a space of mutual envelopment is set in place.
It would be more precise to say that a milieu of mutual envelopment is
activated. It takes, it is set, set alight. The set itself, the literal stage space
and the things it holds—bodies, costumes, microphones—are but the kin-
dling. The activation is between registers. It is set acoustically as well as
linguistically, as speakingly as movingly, as much in sound effect as in the
vocalization of words, in gesture as in intonation. What is activated envel-
ops the difference between these registers, as well as between the events
occurring on each, folding into rhythm. Waves collect. Overbalance.
And fall, he words.
passages
33
At word’s end, suspended by the rising sound surround in the midair of

the dance’s rhythmic milieu, he falls. What is composed, at this moment
in the piece, is the tension between the rising and the falling, language and
gesture: their differential coming together. Just like that is not a comparison
between the contrastive aspects. It is the difference staged, directly sensed.
Just like this—feeling, like at no other moment. Like just this moment’s
felt intensity.
The piece will be made of these differentials, these tensions, these con-
trastive intensities of the moment, on every register, as what happens
on one also rhythmically accrues to the others. The composition will
jump from gesture to wording, and back again, forever circling, swaddling
feeling. Movement will cut into the wording, speaking will interrupt the
moving. At times they will coincide. Cut in, cut out, fold around and
together. Rising, falling, resonating, just like this, just like that, disjunct,
rolling in difference together.
“The sparrows fluttering, rising, and falling in jagged fountains were
part of the pattern; the white and blue, barred with black branches. Sounds
made harmonies . . . the spaces between them were as significant as the
sounds” (Woolf 1992, 24).4
Woolf’s in the Middle

“What is of interest,” Gilles Deleuze always maintained, “is the milieu, what
happens in the middle. It is not by chance that the greatest velocity is in
the middle” (1979, 95). The middle: between rising and falling. It takes
extreme speed, perhaps infinite speed, to pass between rising and falling.
It takes extreme speed, at least at the velocity of thought, to pass between
language and gesture.
What happens in the middle is that the either–or is held fast together in
passing contrast. It is the holding together that is felt, in excess of one or the
other. The in-excess of the one or the other is not a both–and. The either–or
is taken as such into the passing. The differential is sustained. This is what
Deleuze and Félix Guattari term a “disjunctive synthesis” (1983, 12–13).
“The middle,” Deleuze says, “is not an average, but an excess. It is
through the middle that things grow. This was an idea of Virginia Woolf’s”
(1979, 96). The middle is the extremity of disjunctive synthesis, as a growth
medium: the milieu of the performance’s accruing to itself. The pattern of
the passings through the middle give texture to the rhythmic space of the
Ju st Li ke T h at
34
piece’s occurring. Somehow, collectively beginning, collecting difference.

Somehow, suspended in disjunctive synthesis.
The dancers’ somehow is not the somehow of a practical procedure that
is hidden or unapparent. It is transparent. Like when we say that a story is
“somehow sad.” The sadness has been directly felt. Just like that, no ques-
tion. But all the same, there is more. The “somehow” evokes other sad-
nesses, unspecified. It invokes them into this one, echoing. This feeling
resonates with many another, not fully expressed, in all transparency. It
overfills itself with their difference—and the contrast of all sadnesses with
happiness. And now, the same moment, supposedly without hap-
piness. He takes her hand. The gesture passes between sadness and happi-
ness, at the speed of a supposition, at the velocity of thought.
There is always an excess of the feeling in the feeling, by which it over-
flows, or overfills, its designation. In “just like this,” the “this” is too full to
be designated just one. One separation, one, two. One. Two. One,
one-two. Disjunctive synthesis.
It’s like this. Just, like, sad. Supposedly without happiness. Like, sad.
Teenage speech patterns get it: “Like” does not designate an identity or
resemblance. It marks an affective overflow in speech. This feeling is just
sad. More than that, it is just like sad is. It refracts all sadness, and its dif-
ference from happiness, in the singular feeling this is. The words “some-
how” and “just like that” mark the affective tonality of the moment. They
mark affect in language. They linguistically gesture to the feeling tone
of the moment. Although marked in language, the feeling tone has risen
from the middle, in the passing between language and movement.
And between music and voice. And between movement phrases. Dis-
junctive synthesis upon disjunctive synthesis, passing each other in the
middle, crissing, crossing, rolling together into the rhythm of the moment.
The Any-Point of Movement

“Where does the movement start and stop?” (Forsythe 2011, Nov. 10). What
manner of phrasing is native to movement, in its disjunctively synthesiz-
able difference from language and from other registers of experience? This is
the core question around which Forsythe organizes his company’s choreo-
graphic process and to which he never ceases to return. He has returned to
it now, in November 2011, in prerehearsal for the upcoming season. A new
piece is to be created from scratch and old ones revived. Included in the
revivals is Woolf Phrase, which will be performed after a long hiatus. New
passages
35
dancers have joined the company and are being inducted into its move-
ment generation techniques. They likely already know the answer to the
question, as would anyone familiar with Forsythe’s dance vocabulary and
practice: it “starts from any point” . . . and stops at any other (Caspersen
2011, 94; Caspersen 2000, 33; Forsythe 2012).
This sounds like a nonanswer of indifference: whatever . . . (to phrase
it like a teenager again). But when it is added that “any point within each
piece contains the essence of the whole” (Caspersen 2011, 94), it becomes
apparent that far from being indifferent, any-point is a most singular point.
In movement alone, in its own order, uncontrasted with language, any
point is already overfull. The overfullness of movement with itself, on its
own plane, Forsythe says, must be felt for movement to be made.
“Once you stretch one limb,” Forsythe remarks, “all kinds of other places
stretch and retract” (Forsythe 2011, Nov. 10). Stretch it again in a different
way, and the stretches and retractions shift. Every part of the body is a knot
of different potential stretches and retractions radiating from that point as
“so many vectors” (Forsythe 2011, Nov. 10). So many lines of movement,
potentially passing through each point. Each starting point of movement
holds these potential passings through in itself, together in their difference
from each other. The move is less a point than a vectorial gestural nexus:
a differential, dynamic knot of potential variations on itself. A milieu of
movement potential synthetically including an infinity of disjunctions.
The dancers are instructed to “take the movement as far as it will go”
(Forsythe 2011, Nov. 10). But if you are attentive to where it is going, you
feel it move in more than one direction. When the arm is stretching into a
curve, the hip has already joined in throwing the curve. When the arm has
finished moving, the hip is still going. Its movement radiates down into
a flourish of the leg. A single movement comprises a differential “spray”
(Forsythe 2003a) of movement lines akimbo, now beginning now end-
ing, in the moment differently together. The “any-point” where a move-
ment starts and stops is actually a spray, a splay, a spread: a point-field. It
doesn’t start at any point. Movement is not simply localizable in space.5
If the point-field of movement is nonlocalizable, when a dancer seeks
to generate a movement it is not enough to get into position. Position is
the gateway to movement. But it is not of its order. Position is of the fixed
spatial order. Movement’s order is of the always dynamically passing. “A
move,” Forsythe reminds his dancers, “is not so possessed of a place that
Ju st Li ke T h at
36
you can’t find another.” “Keep in touch with the motion. Give up your
position” (Forsythe 2011, Nov. 8).
The question of dance is: “What is it about a position that made it
motion?” (Forsythe 2011, Nov. 10). Answer: the dynamic knot. The differ-
ential gestural nexus. Feel the spray, field the nexus, form the movement
out of the feeling. Keep in touch with the forming motion, “chain the
sensations rather than the positions” (Forsythe 2011, Nov. 10). Giving up
your position and getting in touch with the forming feeling of the motion
triggers what Forsythe calls an “activation”: the field throws a curve amid
a spray (Forsythe 2011, Nov. 10). Movement’s order is an ordering of for-
mative feeling activation. Making movement concerns this fielding, from
the middle, in the gestural milieu, more fundamentally than any notion
of form in the completed sense.
This answer to the question “what is it about a position that makes
it a motion?” raises another question. What do we see of what makes a
motion? What is predominantly seen is indeed a line of movement: the
arm describes a curve. But this visible form of the movement is only a cer-
tain salience of the field of motion. It is but the striking, to the eye, of a
dominant vector. Form is a simplification of the field occurring between
registers, flashing up from their difference to each other. The visible form
of a gesture is a distancing of movement from itself. A movement seen
is a visual effect of movement’s envelopment in a larger differential field
of different orders, different registers of experience, different keys of life,
rhythmically rolled into the moment, in their difference from each other.
Movement in itself, as itself, can only be felt.
The task of the dancer on performance night is to make visible what
can only be felt. To make visible what can only be felt is not the same as
performing a move. It is not to imitate or reproduce a movement form.
“Things happen, but are not performed,” Forsythe warns his dancers. “You
don’t want to perform your work.” “Do it without portraying” (Forsythe
2011, Nov. 10). You do it without displaying. You don’t perform it in that
sense. You just, like, enter into the sensation. Field the point, chain the
sensations, and the audience also will feel the movement’s making, in
the flash-form of its visual effect. They will eye your differential gestural
nexus at a distance. The activation of your point-field will activate the
optical spray of their field of vision (what James Gibson calls the opti-
cal array; 1986). Dynamically, the visual activation will be analogous in
its dynamic contours to the movement spray. They will share the same
passages
37
activation contour6—with a significant difference. Native to the visual system

is the tendency to structure its field not at any-point, but at a focal point.
What in the gestural nexus was a multivectorial knot now homes into ret-
inal focus. The throwing of the curve becomes a stand-out, stand-alone,
visually focused form. The stand-alone form of the movement belongs
wholly to vision. But it can belong to vision only because it has come to
stand out in this way from the shared activation contour that triggered
its appearance. In this shared activation contour, movement and vision
dynamically coincide. They are in a state of dynamic superposition across
their difference from each other, each in its own manner, on its own reg-
ister, according to its own order.
The sharing of the activation contour passes through the middle. Of
itself, it is in neither register. It is in transit. It is trans-manner, trans-register,
trans-order: transductive.7 What is in trans-manner is amodal: neither in
one modality of life nor another, but in the coming-to-pass of their dis-
junctive synthesis.8 In the rhythm of the passing event that is life in this
moment. The visual form is not displayed. The movement is not portrayed
in it. Life splays into it.
Could not precisely the same be said of the relation between move-
ment and language? Language and vision? The different planes of life come
concertedly together in their disjunction, linked eventfully in an analogy
that is grounded in their difference from each other, rather than any for-
mal identity or resemblance. The dynamic analogy of amodal superposi-
tion is what Walter Benjamin, discussing the relation between language,
gesture, and vision, termed a “nonsensuous similarity” (Benjamin 2004;
Massumi 2011, 105–10, 123–24). Just like that. Just like this. One, two, one,
one-two one-two, sprayed multiply across the registers of an experientially
splayed event.
Escape Velocity
Chaining positions and postures is how we experience movement in
its average, everyday functioning. We have our routines. The lunch bell
sounds, a routine sequence of steps leads us, largely unthinkingly, to
the cafeteria. Position after position, posture by posture, we proceed to the
lunch line. We see a vending machine on the way. Unthinkingly, our hand
delves into the pocket and feeds the machine. It’s habitual. The sensori-
motor sequencing follows a logic: if–then. If the bell has rung, then . . . it
all follows. Recognition, logical consequence.
Ju st Li ke T h at
38
To the extent that it unfolds from a recognition according to a logic,

a sensorimotor habit is a kind of thought in action automatically exe-
cuted, below the threshold of conscious awareness. But action is of a dif-
ferent order than movement as such, as in dance. What defines action,
as opposed to movement, is that its execution is swaddled less immedi-
ately in rhythm, than it is mediated by preestablished meaning. In habit,
the body moves into what today’s situation has recognizably in common
with yesterday’s, and what this sameness in the situation means for the
stomach. A sensorimotor habit is a general idea of the body. The mean-
ing is always adaptive: this repeated sequence fits the general situation,
as it did before and will again.
The general idea of these habitual sensorimotor sequences is what
embodied cognition and enactive perception theory (and earlier, Gestalt)
have called “body schemas.” Body schemas are explained in terms of
“implicit knowledge.” These theories typically appeal to the implicit knowl-
edge of body schemas to account for the thought-like aspect of action. Body
schemas are presented as the thinking of the body, in the body. What is
“embodied” are the schemas. What is “enacted” is the general meaning of
the adaptive situation. Maxine Sheets-Johnstone rightly observes that, far
from grasping the manner of thinking incumbent in bodily movement
as such, the concept of body schema implicitly construes what occurs,
thought-like, at the heart of movement, moving on its own level, in its
own register, as mental (why else call it embodied cognition?).9 What other
conceivable status could the element of general meaning have but men-
tal? Generality has nowhere else to be but in a “mind.” The mental status
of the body schema is confirmed by the fact that sequencing can be ade-
quately expressed in logical form: if–then. It has the status of a syllogism.
The syllogistic premise is the general meaning of the situation implicitly
recognized in the triggering of the sequence.10 That general meaning could
just as well have been expressed in language as in movement. Language
does syllogism to a T, as the body does it on habitual cue. The concept of
body schema brings language and movement together not in their dynamic
differing, but in what they generally have in common, of a mental status.
Approaches relying on the concepts of body schema and implicit knowl-
edge fail in their attempted anti-Cartesianism. The body’s dynamism is
implicitly returned to a dependency on a core mentality that can be ade-
quately expressed in logical form and is in the element of general meaning
shared by language. The singularity of movement’s moving is unwittingly
passages
39
retrofitted into an implicit opposition between the mental and the phys-
ical, mind and body. The only way to avoid this dichotomizing refit, the
only way to restore movement to the gestural nexus that is its native ele-
ment, the only way to respect the dynamic spray of movement in and of
itself—as well as in its form-flashing splay between other planes of experi-
ence—is to say that movement embodies nothing but itself. Movement never
embodies anything. It just bodies-forth, at any-point. Embodiment is the
wrong concept.11 Just “bodying” is better. Movement goes a-bodying.
Where the bodying is a thinking in movement, most intensely and alive,
is in movement extracted from action in this sensorimotor sense. “Subtract”
the action, Forsythe tells his dancers (2011, Nov. 17). “We start out with
a process and try to collapse it,” he continues (2011, Nov. 23). Collapse
movement back into itself. Subtract the general meaning from it. Undo
it of its preestablished adaptations. Return it to its gestural nexus. Give it
a more complex logic. Point-field it. Don’t chain positions, chain sensa-
tions. Return the making of movement to the immediacy of its feeling. In
that feeling, a different, more intense, utterly singular thinking will occur.
Where the body is most immediately thinking-movement is not in the
unfolding of body schema. It is in its folding back into itself, back into
the dynamic nexus of its native gestural element. Not unfolding, but infold-
ing. A turning back around onto itself to begin again, never taking leave of
itself, never ending. A turning, a twisting, in: inflection. Movement returns
to itself in its each and every inflection. With every twist, it contracts back
into its own element, to rebegin. Forsythe calls this the “centerpoint” of
movement (2011, Nov. 10). This centerpoint of movement is unlike the cen-
terpoint of vision. It is not a focal point but an any-point. Not a focused
center but a many-vectored point-field. At this inflection point, movement
contracts back into its own “dynamic difference” (Forsythe 2011, Nov. 23),
the differential gestural nexus where it is wholly and only in its element.
“A body is that which folds” (Forsythe 2008).
Movement’s folding in on itself is not something the body does. It is
what bodying is. Movement embodies only itself. Movement’s making
is corporeogenic: becoming-body.
Habit’s adaptive action functionally unfolds. Dance movement inven-
tively infolds. New moves come from movement’s contracting back into
its centerpoint, to re-splay as never before, throwing new curves for the
seeing. Of course, a newly minted dance move is practiced, repeated, per-
fected. It becomes a habit, an acquired skill. But at the heart of every habit
Ju st Li ke T h at
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there is a contracting of the habit. Every adaptive unfolding comes from an

inventive infolding. For this reason, there is a rhythm to dance creation.
To avoid simply performing the movement sequences for the audience, to
avoid simply displaying the visual form, and to avoid the dancers just
portraying a character role in the performance—or just portraying them-
selves in the role of performers—the bodying has to be reactivated at every
moment. All of the techniques that Forsythe has developed over the years
are techniques for movement reactivation.
With respect to all of the techniques, it helps, Forsythe says, to go
“extremely fast” (2003b, 20). Because at extreme speed, the body “pushes
the limit of its coordination” (Forsythe 2003b, 20). Its habits collapse
into the velocity of movement. The body is at the limit of its functional
capacity to chain positions and postures meaningfully and adaptively. It
has no choice but to surrender itself to its own order of sensation. Move-
ment approaches escape velocity, where it returns to its own orbit. Collapse
of the sensorimotor schema.
Take it to the extreme. Take movement to its limit—“and then go fur-
ther” (Forsythe 2011, Nov. 10). Movement doesn’t actually stop. It sub-
sides into itself. It relaxes back into its field, for the reoccurring. It collapses
back into the nonlocality of its any-point, the unlocalized interval of no
perceptible movement. In every movement’s rise and fall, at any-point,
there is an imperceptible interval where the rising and falling coincide.
Waves collect. Overbalance. And fall.
The form of movement, in and of itself, is not a straight line. It is a
pulse. It is a waveform. Forsythe: “Waves on the seashore, one coming
in as the last is going out, overtaking, receding. Don’t be where you are.
Make yourself tidal” (2011, Nov. 10). In the tidal interval, the waves cancel
each other out for an uncountable beat. They collapse into each other in
dynamic superposition. At this any-point of superposition, there is no vis-
ible movement. The body, movement, is in suspense. But the interval is no
less motional for being in suspense: a welling; already a next overtaking a
receding. A one, a two, the interval is co-motional. It doesn’t stand for any-
thing. It doesn’t mean anything in particular—particularly not in general.
It stands for what it is, which is what it does: a repotentializing interval of
movement folding its sequential forms into its rolling on, the subsiding
trace of the last a-bodying with the next to come. Movement never stops.
It suspends itself in its own furtherance.
Movement always starts from a superposition, a mutual inclusion of
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41
sequential forms. The form of the movement cannot be reduced to the

sequencing of positions and postures. Don’t strike the pose: “put the acti-
vation in every part” (Forsythe 2011, Nov. 10). Let your body subside into
its movement pulsing, which will then throw itself a curve. The arc may
well surprise you. Forsythe: “No movement is so possessed of its form that
it cannot find another” (2011, Nov. 10). Ride the wave of movement’s
occurrent variation.
Movement Moving
Movement only comes from movement (Spinoza). Movement is sui generis:
all and only in and of its own order (its own nexus). Language is likewise
sui generis: words only come from other words, in recurring waves, rising
and falling from the linguistic any-point of the superposition of sound and
speech, and of silence and noise. The same goes for vision, in its own dif-
ference, at its dedicated any-point (Paul Klee’s grey point where light and
shadow, hue and illumination, enter into a zone of indistinction, and clar-
ity of reflection clouds back into a spray of refraction, rebecoming pure
optical array).12
Language cannot fully describe movement. Movement does not give
itself over to the order of language, any more than it surrenders itself inte-
grally to visible form. The orders of experience are incommensurable. There
is always a residue, a holding itself in reserve, each in its own element. At
the extreme, each order suspends itself in its own reserve potential: in the
trace of a last foretracing many a next, in a zone of indistinction. Each order
is self-tracing. In the middle, they splay together in their difference. Abso-
lutely amodally, in the dynamic concert of nonsensuous similarity. Modally
incommensurable, they only relate outside anything in common—most
especially outside the logical common of anything that can be attributed
a core mental status.
There is no need to surreptitiously appeal to a common realm of implic-
itly mental status in order to account for the thought-like aspect of move-
ment. Movement “feels like potential” (Forsythe 2011, Nov. 17). Potential is
abstract by nature, in the sense of not yet being this or that, here nor there.
What is abstract feeling, if not thought? Movement-moving is thinking-
feeling: sensation integrally imbued with singular notional force. Poten-
tial is not of the if–then. Potential is allied to what-if. The thinking-feeling
that is movement-moving is speculative: notional in the sense in which it
can be used as a synonym for speculative.
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Language and movement meet in the thinking-feeling. In thinking-

feeling, both are notional in analogous fashion: at the immanent limit of
their ownmost centerpoint, wholly and only in their own mode. Each is
a thinking-feeling after its own fashion. It is here, at the extreme point of
their incommensurability, that they resonate. It’s, like, they mimic each
other. They notion to each other, at a distance, in their difference from
each other. Each any-point, as immanent limit, twists around into the
middle. In the middle, the immanent limits are in abstract superposition.
One, two, one, one-two one-two, in many a multiple. Gestural, visual, aural,
linguistic, in reciprocal transduction. Thinking-feeling is the transversal-
ity of all planes of experience in the immanent twist. It is, like, life. Of
the moment.
The Motional-Relational
In what manner is movement induced into furthering itself in the inven-
tion of new dynamic forms? The answer is quite simple. Movement only
comes from movement. But movement does not come from movement
only sequentially, in a rolling continuity of thinking-feeling motionally
bodying. Movement is always triggered relationally. That is the answer:
movement only comes from movement relationally.
Going extremely fast, as Forsythe suggests, is a key technique for mak-
ing movement move. When a body folds in on its own gestures faster than
the general speed limit of sensorimotor coordination, it self-generates an
inflection of its line of movement. It activates to the extreme, and throws
itself a curve, across the regenerative interval of its return to the any-point.
You have to go so fast as to “be ahead of yourself” (Forsythe 2011, Nov. 23).
“Don’t be adaptive, be predictive” (Forsythe 2011, Nov. 10). That is, be
speculative. Feel it coming at the speed of thought.
Even one body alone is dancing relationally. Its movement stands out
in its difference against the background of all the other dance movements
it potentially might have been. Or—why not?—of all the movements of
dance history. One body alone is moving to the traces of movement’s own
passing, where it just was, absorbed in tracing where it is going. “Sense
motion traces,” Forsythe instructs (2003b, 16). This is what chaining sensa-
tions instead of positions is all about. When one, two, multiple bodies are
dancing, they are moving in relation to a sea of motion traces enveloped
in the any-point. When there is one body alone, its potential makes two.
When there are two, it makes three. When there are three, it makes . . . a
passages
43
second one and a second three. . . . The count gets vague because move-
ment is always in rolling numerical excess over itself. The “thirdness” of all
movement: the sea of motion-traces enveloped in the any-point in relation
to which dancing dances.13
Movement is not sensorimotor. It is motional-relational.14
The motional-relational is in the speculative mode of the what-if.
What-if the bodying, in its thirdness, folds now, extremely fast, too fast
for any subject to think it? What-if one, two, five bodies do this at once?
What-if? The what-if is moving thinking itself out, in an uncommon inten-
sity of feeling.
What-If
Forsythe asks: “Can ballet actually produce . . . something we don’t know?
We’d like to [. . .] investigate what it feels like to speak that way” (2003a).
What-if? What-if this épaulement, this singular movement-formation, were
turned in on itself, subverting the organization of the organs, of the limbs?
What-if the gaze, normally turned askance toward the audience, were
turned in, turned back into the head in visual “disfocus” (Forsythe 2000)
so that “the body [. . .] becomes an ear, [. . .] an organ for listening” to the
rhythmic milieu (Forsythe 2003a)? What-if this extension we call an ara-
besque opened less onto a posture or a pose, a completed form, than onto
the feeling of a passing balance?
Forsythe’s work builds on the what-if. It is never a question of formally
working something out in advance. Speaking of his collaboration with
composer Thom Willems, he explains: “He always wants to know what
are we thinking and I say nothing, we’re just, we’re just organising bod-
ies” (Forsythe 2003a). We are not thinking, the thinking is in the moving.
Organizing bodies does not mean placing bodies on the stage and plan-
ning them into forms. It means reorganizing the body itself, in its com-
motion with other bodies. It means activating collective rhythm on the
level of a relational movement, a level on which form does not single out.
“When I go into the studio I want to be able to see what is in front of me,
I want to not have another idea.” Idea, here, is allied to form. What-if asks
another kind of question, a question of technique: “The biggest challenge,
is not seeing what I want to see but seeing what’s actually in front of my
eyes” (Forsythe 2003a). A spray.
This encounter with not knowing—epitomized, while we were in
Frankfurt, by the development of a new piece called Whole in the Head
Ju st Li ke T h at
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(2011)—keeps the process alive and uncertain. With Whole in the Head,
weeks of rehearsal were completely unmoored two hours before the open-
ing performance when Forsythe decided to change the piece, using only
certain sections of what had been rehearsed and reordering them. In keep-
ing with his idiosyncratic practice of the what-if, Forsythe then fundamen-
tally altered the piece for each of the nine performances to come. This was
not just staging. It was a rigorous engagement with “seeing what’s actu-
ally in front of [your] eyes,” the what-if of movement activated both on
the stage-space of performance and in its co-composition with other per-
formances just past, a movement precise with training but still open to
regeneration.
The focus in Forsythe’s work on the what-if is everywhere present in
his ample arsenal of movement techniques, but it can be felt particularly
keenly in the techniques of cueing and aligning. In moving to cue, Forsythe
asks the dancers to become sensitive, collectively, to how the dance as a
whole moves. You cue to the trace of a movement-moving, to its repeatable
tendency, yes, but even more so to the what-if of its emergent evolution.
This means that you dance less into the movement-form as it happened
in the past than into the speculative figuring of movement’s incipient
future. Aligning, then, means tuning to the what-if as it commotionally
appears, in movement-transition. You move to the trace of a movement
coming to a landing, you align to its capacity for transition, to its complex
of potential, already-on-its-way. You align to the what-if of a movement’s
futurity—the not-quite of its having come into being. If–then necessarily
follows. Gravity acts on the body in movement, moving it to land or flow
in relatively habitual ways. But movement-moving has been opened up
by the what-if to its own variation—to new collective sprays, new combi-
nations, new “flow-matches,” as the company calls them.
“Synching is not what’s important, in the sense of matching already
known timing,” Forsythe explains (2011, Nov. 8). What’s important to the
what-if of cueing and aligning is how position itself becomes movement.
“Go slower, be in the other’s past (right before they catch up to you), then
move past them to their future—look for the moment—aim at it rather
than going directly to it [. . .] then shift” (Forsythe 2011, Nov. 8). Time-shift.
You don’t always move at extreme speed, you vary the rhythm. Remember
the rhythmic milieu.
What-if is the “actually seeing what’s in front of you” of movement’s
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45
capacity to speculate. What-if is the “body becomes an organism for lis-

tening” of a collective body’s capacity to activate and be activated by an
“acoustic environment” (which we take as a synonym for the rhythmic
milieu). What-if is the collective movement-moving created, in mutual
superposition, in the commotion of a complex that cannot be reduced to
two: one, two, one, two, one-two, one-two, in thirdness.
What if the one were always already more than one?
What does it feel like to speak that way?
The Notional in the Motional

“In a truly successful dance,” Forsythe explains, the body “takes over at
the point where you” have “no more idea” (2003a, 24). Like the choreog-
rapher watching the dance unfold, you, the dancer, must dance with the
unknowability of “what’s actually in front of my eyes.” You must dance
the future in its visionary unfolding. In the motional intensity of “not
knowing,” operational, always, within the time-loop of the flow-match, it
is the “body that dances you around” (Forsythe 2003a, 26): the thought-
body. Thinking in movement. “The body thinking itself into the flow of
the world, and the world flowing into the thinking of the body” (Caspersen
2011, 100). The dance does not have to embody movement ideas, does
not have to think the idea in advance of its commotion. Motionally, the
body is already speculatively tinged with mentality, in its own mode.15 In
motion, the body is already notional, in its own order. “Corporeal-kinetic
forms and relations are conceptual by their very nature” (Sheets-Johnstone
2009b, 221). There is no having ideas. You do not have ideas. The body itself,
with its rhythmic milieu, is a motional-notion: a movement of thought.
Dance that thought around.
Becoming Visionary
One, two, one-two, one-two. He taps the mic: one-two, one-two.
We sense a shift in register: he is preparing to tell us something, preparing
to give us an image in a register of direct address we will never see/hear
again throughout the piece. She continues to move slowly in the distance,
movement-mewling. And then he speaks, walking back while holding the
microphone, as though opening the acoustic environment to its furthest
recesses, recesses that include her without in any way addressing her role,
her place, in the story. He speaks directly to us: Did you hear the one
about Virginia Woolf and the Dalai Lama? Pause. Well, Virginia
Ju st Li ke T h at
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Woolf and the Dalai Lama are walking down the beach, and
there’s something shining in the sand, and the Dalai Lama,
he bends down he bends and picks it up. It’s a mirror. A little
mirror. A pocket mirror. And he looks into the mirror, and
he says, “Hey, I know this person!” and Virginia Woolf says,
“Give me that mirror.” And so she looks into the mirror, and
she says, “Well, of course you know this person, silly. That’s
me! That’s you, one hundred years from now!” One hundred
years from now.
When Forsythe speaks of not wanting to miss seeing “what’s actually
in front of my eyes,” it seems that he is referring to vision in the standard
sense. Look in the mirror and see what’s there, right in front of you. He
wants to see what is happening, and to choreograph with the present in
the mode of the just-like-that. No ideas in advance—let the process show
you its own evolution. “Don’t be afraid to let things reveal themselves,”
Forsythe tells his dancers. “Sometimes it [what the work’s about] doesn’t
come until the end” (Corbin 2012). See it for what it is, in the middling of
its coming to be. The problem is, the movement is aligning to futurity, its
reflection askance. One hundred years from now: that’s me, silly! How can he
or the dancers work with “what’s actually in front of my eyes” when it is
landing onto the present from the unknowability of the future? How can
they work with the mirror when the mirror at once reflects me and you,
one, two, one-two in the uncertain field of vision that includes the now and
the one hundred years from now? What does it mean to “really see” in the
mode of the speculative?
Movement generation techniques in the Forsythe Company are enliv-
ened by a paradox of double vision. To be in the present in its unfolding
is to be in the future-flow of a nonlinear time-match. The sensorimotor is
always in commotion with the motional-relational, in disjunctive synthe-
sis. The body, articulating in the present the complexity of dance-form, is
always also being asked to match-flow to a welling future movement. The
sensorimotor is alive in the taking-form, led by the motional relational,
poised at the limit where now and next are co-composing.
Forsythe Company dancer Dana Caspersen explains: “I experience two
kinds of vision at once. The space around [is] alive with potential, invisi-
ble forms, and lines of movement. I am continually ambushed, caught up,
in this welter of doubled vision” (2011, 97). This superposition of actively
engaging with the just-now—just like that—of the complexity of the
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47
present presenting itself, is superposed with the futurity of how the what-
will-come has already left its trace on the movement-welling.
Forsythe describes this technique as having a vision (2003a; Manning
2013, 86). Having a vision, in the moving, means moving beyond this
body, this form, toward the unfolding of how movement will be affected
by the middling, which will flow into it from the future. A dizzying task,
but one that cleaves movement from its habitual sensorimotor cues and
alignments, inviting it to invent with a bodying. Two versions of cueing
and aligning are co-active here, in the field of double vision. There is the
habitual sensorimotor organization of the body in its causal flow—a for-
ward step cueing to gravity, aligning to the slope of the floor—and the
Forsythe Company’s technique of cueing to movement-moving in a non-
local field of co-action and collective aligning in counterpoint to the field’s
patterned interplay.16
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway also plays with vision, tuning it toward
the visionary. It was this aspect of the text that most excited the For-
sythe Company in the creation of Woolf Phrase (Forsythe 2003a). Working
through the text, Forsythe speaks of having the insight that a technique
could be invented to make dancing visionary. The dancers could technically
become visionary. The technique that he originally developed, and that
was enhanced through the making of the piece, “had to do with identically
remembering another person’s variation, or sprays, and building a kind of
architecture of movement around it.” The caveat: “you had to keep seeing
this other person dancing in order to perform it, so it was a way of having
a vision” (Forsythe 2003a). A collective vision.
This evolved into two techniques for becoming visionary, both of which
were set in place for the making of Woolf Phrase. The first, “telescoping,”
involves actively working with the gaze. “We tried to focus our gaze, if
looking at an arm movement, on the line proposed by the movement. The
body follows the gaze to where the movement begins, turns around this
point, and finally turns the gaze in another direction,” Forsythe dancer
Prue Lang explains (2004, 126). First, you follow the line of movement with
your gaze. And then, still looking, you visualize where the line can go and
move into it. You turn around that point, looking both for what you can
see and for what you can’t see. Double the vision. Then turn the gaze in
another direction, in a splay of focus. Make the unseen felt, bring it into
appearance through movement. The aim is not to replicate a movement,
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or even to follow a movement, but to continue it by other means. Acti-

vate the field by pulling the line of movement into a new direction. Twist.
“Metascoping,” the more amodal version of the two techniques, works
by feeling-seeing the time of movement. “We had to react to the movement
of another body by allowing the gaze to move toward, away or around
lines of movement” (Lang 2004, 126). You follow the movement as it
unfolds, at the same time exceeding its arc, away and around, entering into
its future. Time bends space: this is what it means to be visionary. Differ-
entials of speed and intensity are created. “When the movement reaches a
certain speed, these short dialogues become increasingly reactive and
remind us of swarming bees” (Lang 2004, 126). Commotion. Moving into
movement’s incipient future, following its lines of intensity, means invent-
ing the path movement can take in the untimeliness of its future-forming.
Space-time of movement-moving, as generative movement field.
The sensorimotor organization of the body in its sequential form-
following is subverted by the force of the visionary. To generate a move-
ment, the dancer must move beyond the form of what was and learn how
to “sense motion traces.” This opens up movement to its otherness, sim-
ilarly to the way Proust talks about the necessity of opening language to
“a kind of foreign language within language, which is neither another
language nor a rediscovered patois, but a becoming-other of language, a
minoritization of this major language, a delirium that carries it off, a witch’s
line that escapes the dominant system” (Deleuze 1997, 5).
Double vision, in the end, is less about vision than it is about pro-
prioception. To “visualize” a movement is to “see” it proprioceptively: in
body-vision.17 To move into the futurity of movement-moving is to have
a body-vision in the dancing. It is to move with the future in its unfold-
ing, to be moving in the very creation of space-times of experience, to be
caught up, just like that, in the simultaneity of the wake of movement per-
ishing as it meets the welling of its futurity, dancing at the nexus of expe-
rience infolding.
Dance that thought around.
As-If
The motional-relational in the mode of the what-if is futurity in movement.
What-if: the body folds, extremely fast, too fast for any subject to think
it. What-if: cueing to movement sprays, we activate a collective bodying
that alters the affective tonality not only of the movement itself, but of the
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49
rhythmic milieu. What-if: a curve is thrown that cannot be predicted in its

particulars, precisely because it has been relationally imbued with futurity,
fielding itself into novel form.
What must language do to become-visionary? What are its techniques
for opening language to the foreignness, as Proust says, of its becoming-
other? In Virginia Woolf, the “as if” plays this role, folding as it does the
present into its double: “She began to go slowly upstairs, with her hand on
the bannisters, as if she had left a party, where now this friend now that
had flashed back her face, her voice [that’s me, silly!]; had shut the door
and gone out and stood alone, a single figure against the appalling night,
or rather, to be accurate, against the stare of this matter-of-fact June morn-
ing” (Woolf 1992, 33). As-if, the holding pattern of a difference in time, time
looped onto itself toward the impossibility of getting the story straight once
and for all. Not just “it could have been this way,” but “it was this way, and
that way as well, at the same time”: disjunctive synthesis, just like that. As-
if—“straight” in the middle.
As-if, he says. As if things were just this bright, or . . . as if
things were just that loud, or twisting at the hips this fast gesturing
toward her that far. As if there was just this one distance, this
one, marking a short distance between his hands separation. One sep-
aration, one, two. One. Two. One, one-two tapping the mic one-
two, one-two.
As-if, Virginia Woolf writes, “as if this beauty, this scent, this colour
[. . .] were a wave which she let flow over her and surmount that hatred,
that monster, surmount it all”; “as if one will worked legs and arms uni-
formly, and life, with its varieties, its irreticences, had been laid under a
pavement of monuments and wreaths and drugged into a stiff yet staring
corpse by discipline” (Woolf 1992, 14). Seventy-five times as if in Mrs Dal-
loway, each time touching on the impossibility of the simple coupling of
this and now. As-if, a rhythmic suspension that holds the presenting of the
present to itself in itself, that denies this image its simplicity of unfolding,
creating a knot in the discursivity of language. As-if: a mode that moves
language to its narrative limit, pushing language to say not how if and
then follow, but how “if” becomes its own limit, a transversal limit that
cuts across the if–then.
When the Forsythe Company decided to work with Mrs Dalloway, the
focus, once again, was not on retelling her story, but on “moving around
the rhythm of Woolf’s language” (Sulcas 2001). How to move into the
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text’s visionary force? How to fold movement into the as-if of Mrs Dallo-
way’s speculative language? How to create techniques that were capable
not of responding to language, or illustrating language, but of moving in
counterpoint with language? Dog-like, seagull-like, not in the realm of rep-
resentation, but in the elemental realm of formative feeling-tone. “Richard
and I worked to dehumanize our bodies by giving them elemental quali-
ties (like the ocean) or animal qualities (like a bird, a dog, or bees). Move-
ment thus becomes entangled with sound or nature: circling and mewling,
barking and jumping, the sound of waves surging” (Lang 2004, 128). Cir-
cling, jumping, surging: not forms but activation contours. As-if: in non-
sensuous similarity.
Forsythe defines counterpoint as “a field of action in which the inter-
mittent and irregular coincidence of attributes between organizational
elements produces an ordered interplay.”18 Counterpoint of movement
and language in Woolf Phrase is best understood as a coinciding of both at
their limit, in the relational any-point of the motional and the notional.
Here, the what-if of movement and the as-if of language co-compose.
Together they unsettle the linearity of time in the tense of the if–then. In
the speaking and in the moving, working in disjunctive synthesis, two
speculative time signatures interrupt one another. What-if asks the dancer
to “anticipate the other dancer’s future.” In this movement proposition,
the dancer is being asked to shift time, to make time in the tense of the
future-felt. As-if asks the reader to place in an uneasy holding pattern more
than this one image, more than this one narrative line.
As if there was just this one. Language interrupts the dancers
who, a moment ago, were moving together, he drawing circles around
her seagull-like movements in a contortion that seems to meet her move-
ment halfway, never touching, always sidling. As if there was just this one,
she, standing to his left, now immobilized as though holding her breath.
Immobilized in a movement alive in its stillness, a lingering suspension.
As-if this were the only way of moving the text, of speaking the dance. As-
if it had to be language or movement. As-if the relational didn’t already
hold them together in disjunction, just this way. Superposed, what-if and
as-if, moving together in their difference. Think the superposition as a
flashpoint, felt as rhythm. Rhythm as the expression of movement and
language coming together.
“The perception of similarity,” Walter Benjamin writes, “is in every case
bound to a flashing up. It flits past, can possibly be won again, but cannot
passages
51
really be held fast as can other perceptions” (2004, 695). The coinciding of
the as-if and the what-if produces a flash of similarity. Just like this. Simi-
larity at the flashpoint is nonsensuous because it is thought-felt at the any-
point limit of expression where both movement and language become
foreign to their general functioning in “a delirium that carries [them] off,
a witch’s line that escapes the dominant system.” Nonsensuous similarity:
directly thought-felt in the register of the visionary.
Nonsensuous perception comes together with sensuous perception at
all stages of Woolf Phrase. We sit and watch the work in its unfolding, alive
to the minute changes in tempo, the rise and fall of voice, the undulat-
ing of the wall of sound. We also perceive, nonsensuously, the edgings
into co-composition of rhythm-becoming-language, of rhythm-becoming-
movement. The paradox of disjunctive synthesis makes itself felt at each
stage of the commotion: language and movement are not one, and yet, at
their limit, they flash up in a oneness of similarity. As-if.
Woolf Phrase: an ordered interplay that invents relationally at the limit
of the notional and the motional. Woolf Phrase: a recurrence in lingering
suspension of a rhythm in the making. The piece, Forsythe says, is always
changing, ever generating variations on itself: no two nights quite identi-
cal, but . . . somehow . . . yet . . . quite the same.
When the notional meets the motional, it’s not that we no longer under-
stand the words. It’s not even that we don’t ally the words to the move-
ment. It’s that the words, in the mode of the as-if, contort to the movement
they activate. It’s that language, when in counterpoint with movement at
the limit, tweaks into a rhythm with movement. At this any-point, lan-
guage, like movement, proposes itself as “an organ for listening.” We hear
it sounding, its counterpoint with movement creating a joint rhythmic
milieu. While we can differentiate the words from Willems’s acoustic envi-
ronment, while we know what is language and what is movement and
what is sound—PAAF!—we are no longer certain where expression begins
and ends. Notionally, we have “no idea.” Knowing and unknowing co-
compose, dancing thought around.
And so we are left not with a story about a dog—he wags his leg—or
about a sparrow—her movement-mewls—or about a woman and the Dalai
Lama seeing each other cross-eyed—but with a dance that moves language
in the middle. Just like that.
Ju st Li ke T h at
52
Reset
Midway through the piece, a shift occurs. The movement is cut by touch,
touch taking on the role of the all of a sudden, resetting movement in
the making.
The touch cues the return of the same moment, with a difference. And
now the same moment, supposedly without happiness. As-if. He
takes her hand. Still no happiness.
Stricken once.
He pulls her back, away from the microphone, away from language,
his movement folding into hers, the gesture of touch leading her into the
vortex of a commotion increasingly turned in on itself, their movements
swarming, future-forming.
She moves back to the microphone, his body still connected to hers,
his balance passing through an arabesque. She: Stricken twice. An ara-
besque, spiraling already into a circling, his body folding through her back-
ward movement. She, reaching toward him. Hands held, a sense of push
and pull. A suspended connection, wary of the measure of the touch, it
seems. For while the movement looks to proceed by cause and effect, in
fact what is active is a mobile relational interval—a co-constitutive suspen-
sion of movement in the moving. Touch strikes. It cuts into the relational
interval. It does not stop movement so much as set it in motion, again,
differently. It reorganizes, reorients, pulling movement-moving into knife-
edge precision. A moment of clarity. Stricken.
The moment of clarity appears from the wash of movement-moving.
The clarity was of course always already there, active in the midst, if eclipsed
by the velocity, the agility, of the movement-moving. Clarity is a signal
for the viewer. Look again, it says. Think-feel the difference. Don’t forget: the
touch comes between the moving and the speaking, recalibrating not only
the motional but also the notional. Think touch as that which acts on the
flow to pull from it a clearing of relation.
Touch resets relational movement not by bringing it to rest in this or
that human body, but by activating a momentary pause in the frenzy that
reorients the field as a whole.19 Yes, he lays his hand on her shoulder. Yes,
she stills. But really what is happening is less about him, or about her, or
about them touching. It is about giving us a window into the wider field,
giving us pause to encounter, with them, the counterpoint of movement
and language in a field of experience continuously folding back on itself.
passages
The Forsythe Company, Woolf Phrase,
performed by Prue Lang and Richard Siegal
54
No linear sequencing here: touch as the reset button for a rebeginning, a

spiraling back.
OK, we’re back.
The touching reset of relational movement creates a hiatus in movement-
moving. This invites us to see dance moving not into form, but into the
sprays, the traces, through which form spreads. Sprays: the folding through
of movement becoming rhythmic milieu. Sprays: the affective surplus of
the sensorimotor, the curve that exceeds this habitual stance, the moving
at the point of inflection that tunes toward a collective individuation not
only of the dancers, but of the whole field of activation, the field that
includes, at its limit, the folds of Mrs Dalloway as well as every movement
proposition that went into each of the choreographed sequences. Every-
thing is there in abeyance, suspended in each movement, lingering in
each utterance. But what makes the work work is not the everything, but
the overflowing singularity of how this point of inflection tunes to this
rhythmic fold at any-point, in the counterpoint of the notional and the
motional. Stricken. Reset: from lingering to just like that.
Stricken thrice. PAAF! Willems’s suddenly amplified sound wall fills
the moment. PAAF! Same moment again, without the sound.
Touch resets the any-point of movement. By calling attention to the
any-point of movement, touch makes visible the incommensurability of
the two, one, two, one-two. Watch them move: note how the touch acti-
vates a slowing, an intensive attending, not only to that through which
relational movement moves, but to the shape of the work as a moving
whole, to the shape of its sidling to language and contorting to move-
ment. Watch how touch acts on movement, stilling its delirium. But note
also how its stalling of movement works to make apparent what, follow-
ing Proust, we might call movement’s witch’s line, its capacity to upset
the dominant code that seeks only to generalize experience. The touch is
unnerving—it undoes expectation, refusing to connect the two in an easy
intimacy. Touch: giving the viewer, the dancer, the bearings from whence
to start again, differently, in the middle. For what moves is not one dancer
connecting with another. What moves is a moving in the middling, a col-
lective moving-with that connects to movement’s visionary potential, in
a nexus with language.
We start out with a process and try to collapse it.
In the collapse, the witch’s line of the dance is reactivated. The any-
point beckons. We watch, the movement dizzying in its speed. No, start
passages
55
again. Watch again. Be in it, in the middle. Touch. Stricken. Any point in
space resets to the any-point of movement. Learn to feel it. “It feels like
potential” (Forsythe 2011, Nov. 17).
Same moment. All of a sudden, again, somehow. PAAF!
Somehow, Circling
All of a sudden, you remember where you are. Pause. Good-bye.
OK, we’re back.
Woolf Phrase’s visionary quality creates a suspension, a lingering in
the future-forming moment. She, movement-mewling. He, again sitting
toward the edge, watching her, waiting. This holding pattern, cut by touch,
reset—PAAF!—circles the piece around itself, somehow. Two velocities are
continuously at work, two modes in attention, two levels—language and
movement—in counterpoint. This doubling keeps the piece active, alive at
the limit of what movement and language, in their differential, are capa-
ble of. One register alone, if given dominance, would dampen the force of
what is at work here. We might look for Meaning instead of heeding the
call to attention to movement-moving. We might catch ourselves seeing
Mrs Dalloway told, in movement. Illustration, representation redux. But this
is not what is happening. A thirdness is coming into play, in the elemen-
tal force of the two, one-two, coming together. This thirdness contracted,
always, through the creative disjunction of the match-flow and its reset.
What do language and movement do, at this limit where they refract
into thirdness? They remake themselves at the edge of time, where time
itself is at the limit of its spiraling. Time folds. In. Ever. Widening. Cir-
cles. Life and death in co-composition, in the shape of a wave cresting.
Stricken. Leaden. Circles.
Fear no more, says the heart. Willems’s sound acute, the move-
ment frenzied, she at the microphone. Fear. No. More. He, on the ground,
moving around her, the intense sound crescendoing in a semblance of the
PAAF!, resetting the field of movement and language. She, still standing at
the mic, her breath sounding, in and out, the effort of her words, of her
movement, palpable. He, crouched, watching her from a distance.
She: Fear no more, says the heart. Breath: in, out, in, out. Com-
mitting its burden to some sea. In, out, in, out. And with a final
twist. Twist. She bowed her head. Very politely. In, out, in, out.
She went barely audible paaf. A quiet darkening. She. Had gone. She,
had gone. She, the face in the mirror—that’s me! that’s you!—one hundred
Ju st Li ke T h at
56
years from now, death folding into life, life folding forward. She, had gone.
She, voice of no age, no sex—elemental, here and gone, of the wave.
Overtaking and receding. Just like that. Somehow.
Across the co-composition of just like that and somehow, across the
threshold of death and its lingering at the edges of life, the refrain returns:
As if there was just this one. As-if, as if two could make one. But what
if two made three? What-if the two, the one-two of language and move-
ment were reset, just this way, into an inexpressible thirdness? What if
just like that and somehow were the cues through which the piece aligned
itself, again and again, to the force of its doubling? What if just like that
and somehow were the terms of the work’s limit, the mark of how the work
must continuously move through the absolute difference of a vertiginous
lingering in expression?
Somehow, a likeness. Somehow, as if two times, two events, this and its
likeness, could linger in cohabitation, as-if. Just like that, the flashpoint of
nonsensuous similarity, the cut into likeness that brings time’s overflow
into the moment, this moment. But what a strange moment, this specious
present, a moment qualified not by its being-present but by its spread, by
the span of time it includes, the past and future rolling into it. A visionary
moment, a futurity in the making.
This is what language and movement can do in co-composition. They
can take the lingering of the somehow and, with touch, reset it toward the
just like that such that suddenly, the contorting of time is acutely felt across
expression in the making. Woolf Phrase’s proposition: to allow both move-
ment and language, at their counterpoint, to create a movement of thought
that moves time differentially, that motions across speeds and slownesses,
that sidles toward the disjunction of differential tendencies even while
composing across their nonsensuous similarity.
Co-composition, suspended in the force of a recurrence.
The piece comes to an end. He, at the microphone. She, standing back,
movement-mewling.
And as they looked, the whole world became perfectly
silent. Pause. And a flock of gulls crossed the sky, first one gull
leading, then another. Pause. And in this silence, in this purity,
in this pallor, bells struck eleven times, their sound floating
up there among the gulls.
Thirteen seconds of silence. He, standing at the microphone, looking
forward but gesturing back in her direction. She, behind him, completely
passages
57
still. No more mewling, the acoustic environment full, once more, with
Willems’s sound. The scene is set.
And then, all of a sudden. The stage bathes in a darkness that lin-
gers across the all of a sudden.
All of a sudden, a lingering. And so we are reminded that the suspen-
sion is everywhere speciously present, speculatively active at different
velocities, notionally in different registers, relationally across every modal-
ity of experience. A lingering, a suspension of isolatable movement form,
a suspension of language, as designation or narration, and also a suspen-
sion, within movement-moving, of its human characters, tuning to their
elemental qualities, gesturing to dance’s capacity to hold dissonant times
together in movement.
As if there was just this one.
Ju st Li ke T h at
No Title Yet
B r a c h a Ett i n g e r : M o v e d b y L i g h t
series one
Move by Light
Faces. They come and go. They drift, resizing themselves as they shift. At
times, they separate from the figures supporting them. The figures also
come and go. They multiply forth, no sooner to recede. Vicissitudes of face
and figure move through the painting series, in ephemeral community.
Their restless movement is not governed by the principles of portraiture,
nor by those of figuration in any traditional sense. Bracha Ettinger says of
her paintings that they “have their own formative axis that goes through
the painting process” (2010). That axis, she explains, is light. The faces and
figures that come and go move by light.
“The viewer does not have the axis.” The paintings are “not conditioned
by the viewer” (Ettinger 2010). This can only mean that the light in ques-
tion is not a light of illumination. It is not a light cast upon a scene from
an outside source to disclose its contents, as at the flip of a switch.
Yet the process does start with the flip of a switch. In the Eurydice series
(1992–2007), the switch was the on button of a photocopier.1 A found
image was consigned to the machine. The machine’s role was to give the
already-there of the found image a new beginning. This was done by stop-
ping the copying midrun, before the toner had completely set. Unset-
tled grains were left in chance-swept motion, setting the stilled contours
of the image to drift. This machinic reinstilling of movement dispossessed
the found image of its status as an origin, distancing the painting process
from the touchstone of the photo’s recognized content.2 The image rebe-
gins, in a play of light interacting not with a viewer, but with the electric
charges of the toner particles and the drum. Interacting not perceptually,
but machinically and materially, outside the traditional painterly domain.
59
60
This reinaugural light interaction proceeds unseen into the forming

painting. It is not even seen at this stage by the painter, other than as a
passing flash that dazzles perception rather than enabling it. The painter
herself does not have the axis. The reinaugural gesture of flipping the switch
dispossesses her of her painterly will. Her aesthetic choice has also been
consigned to the machine. Authorial volition, no less than spectatorial per-
ception, is challenged by an anonymous light suspending both the origin
and the destination of the painting process. A light that is not cast on the
image to illuminate it, but actively casts the image, from within the pro-
cess of its formation. An activity of light that rebegins the image, imma-
nent to its formative process.
The work of Ettinger’s evolving painting process will be to cast this
machinic-material dynamic of image-forming light back into a perceptual
dynamic—still off the axes of spectatorial perception and authorial voli-
tion, on an axis of light, immanent to the image-forming process. The artist
characterizes that axis as “spiritual,” suggesting that a new meaning would
have to be imagined for that word, independent of its religious connota-
tions.3 For her painting process has no more to do with “enlightenment”
than with illumination. When the found images move into the subsequent
stages of the image-forming process, the rebeginning play of light between
toner and drum continues in a form-finding interplay between color and
white. The image emerging from the photocopier is now consigned to
brushwork. Colors cloud, drifting as they shift. Whites come and go, into
hue and out. Their movement is not governed by any direct application
of principles of composition. It continues to emerge, in a manner that
can still be called machinic—if that word can be used for a form-coming
that occurs in a suspension of authorial will and spectatorial perception,
in relation to an outside of those axes, immanent to the painting process.
No More is Not the End of It

All is luminous . . . Yet nothing tells of day: no hour, no shadow.
—michel foucault, Death and the Labyrinth
Drift to white. White appears, increasingly, in the No Title Yet series (2003–
10). In No Title Yet, No. 3—Eurydice, St Anne it reaches the point that cloud-
like wafts of white trouble traces of figuration inherited from earlier series.
The whiteness stands out from the trace-forms, and at the same time
passages
Bracha Ettinger, No Title Yet – Eurydice, St Anne, 2003–2010.
Reproduced courtesy of the artist.
62
recedes from them. The standing out and receding back of white does not
sandwich the trace-forms between two layers. It veins through them. They
are suspended in the movement of white’s foregrounding backgrounding
itself. The trace-forms are suspended in this movement. They shiver with it,
it mists them. They vibrate in the activity of white’s self-relating, a cease-
less movement going nowhere else.
White movement’s self-relating is the space of the trace-forms’ appear-
ance, unsettled into, or fallen out of, any three-dimensional spatial matrix
capable of stably containing them. They are not in the vibration. They are
of it. It is through them. They are beings of the vibration.
“Forces entering the field of painting,” Ettinger says, “are translated as
vibrations” (2010).
“How could I add a form to that? I’m not there yet” (Ettinger 2010).
The forms, faces and figures, are no longer there, except as vibratory
traces of a process moving through them.
“In painting,” Ettinger says, “there is a lot of treating what is not going
to be there any more.” But “no more is not the end of it.” No more is where
“I” find myself, not yet—again. Still painting, across series that may end
but never come to a definitive close. “Sometimes two paintings from dif-
ferent series based on the same image call to each other, and something
that happens in the new one will demand a change in an old one. This
was the case with No Title Yet, No. 3 and Eurydice, No. 23” (Ettinger 2010).
The painting process opens itself to formative forces entering its field
and moving across the paintings and their seriations, in both directions.
Something happens. Accidents happen, filling an individual canvas like
No Title Yet, No. 3 with a vibratory self-relating. The fore-to-back two-way
movement-through detains in that individual painting, for a luminous
moment (telling nothing of day), the moving back and forth across paint-
ings and series of forms tracing themselves in a rhythm of appearing and
disappearing.4 One painting can call another actively back into the paint-
ing process because each detains the movement of the whole in itself. The
paintings-series, severally as a whole, resonate in each individual painting.
The individual painting vibrates with the whole of the series, whose move-
ment it holds in its self (relating).
“It’s all about intensity” (Ettinger 2010). Intensity: resonating in (across
vibrations).
“It’s not about perception. It’s about connecting” (Ettinger 2010).
It is with this intensity of connecting-in, across, that the artist finds
passages
63
herself again, still not there in no more definitive a way than the painting
process will complete itself.
The series comprise a never definitively completed whole, which enters
nevertheless as a whole into each painting, as its formative movement
across.
It is precisely in terms of the intensive feeling of an open relational
whole that Gilles Deleuze defines the spiritual. The forces entering the
field of painting that transduce as vibrations are spiritual forces: forces of
thought. Thought forcefully felt. A thinking-feeling arising from the mate-
rial dynamic of the painting process but in resonant/vibratory excess of its
hour, and of the metric time of any of its determinate elements’ enduring.
“The paintings contain duration” (Ettinger 2010). They do not contain
faces and figures in time. They contain time, in the trace-forming of faces
and figures appearing-disappearing through connective resonation and in
self-relating vibration.
The time of the painter’s I-not-yet-again is the content of the paint-
ing process.
I-not (yet again): non-I.
What fills the painting process is the time-field of the painter’s non-I,
moving nowhere else than in the intensity of a thinking-feeling open-whole.
series two
Painting at the Threshold
What is essential, are intercessors.
—gilles deleuze, Negotiations
A book with Claude Monet’s Water Lily Pond lies open on a wooden bench
a meter or so away from Ettinger’s canvas. “A friend,” she calls the image.
Beside the Monet, another book with Leonardo da Vinci’s St. John the Bap-
tist also lies open. On the wall above—one of only two, as the space is
open to the outside on one end and continuous with the rest of the house
on the other—there are four or five earlier paintings, not a consistent num-
ber: they will get taken down, be replaced, repainted even. There are also
two easels, sometimes holding multiple paintings, each in progress. And
notebooks with their own complex mix of words and images.
On two sides, the house opens to the outside, its architecture extended
by a wraparound patio. Seated on a chair between the two easels at the very
threshold where the inside meets the outside, Ettinger paints.
No Tit le Ye t
64
What is the status of this outside? The outside as Foucault defines it is

an interval, a force that cuts in and populates. “I am always leaving holes
through which something comes” (Ettinger 2010). The outside is not in
juxtaposition to an inside: its coming in turns the inside out.
Ettinger attends to this outside. She rarely leaves the house, intensively
attuned to the vibrations of the outside’s shifting threshold. For it is here
that her work finds the more-than of its figuration. Ettinger paints the
forces—the outsides—that quiver at the edge of experience. She paints
the threshold.
The threshold shifts. It vibrates. It is not figure or form. Not this or that
history, this or that memory. It resonates with all it touches. But it cannot
quite be seen.
For Ettinger, painting is not about seeing. It is felt, it touches, it
moves, it resonates. To paint the outside is about a feeling-with, a thinking-
feeling that occurs in a relational field, across works in the making. This
studio that Ettinger has made herself is not haphazard: its relational envi-
ronment is set up to make the outside a participant.
The outside is intercessor.5 It is felt more than seen. Thought in the feel-
ing. “Painting’s thoughts are not the gaze’s thoughts” (Ettinger 1993, 15).
It is force before it is form, participant, enabler, disturbance before it is
figure.
Friends
The outside brings friends. They are carefully positioned in Ettinger’s stu-
dio, choreographed in a fielding intensively open to them. They populate.
They participate. They provoke. But they are not influences in any direct
sense, or even inspirations. They are “distances.” Outsides that resonate
from within. “Distance—The tree of this green, the face of these lines”
(Ettinger 1993, 9).
They are intercessors, cutting in. There is no work, Deleuze writes, with-
out them. “Fictive or real, animate or inanimate, our intercessors must be
created. They come in series” (Deleuze 1995, 125).
“I gave myself intercessors,” writes Pierre Perrault, “to be able to say what
I have to say” (in Deleuze 1995, 125). Intercessors—forces of the outside—
are made, created, given to a process. Ettinger’s studio is carefully crafted,
to enter it is to enter a world: Monet, da Vinci, her own paintings on easels,
on the wall, Lacanian publications, a book of philosophy open to a certain
passages
65
passage, the constant cup of iced coffee, Johann Sebastian Bach’s Matthaus
Passion or, in other moods, Keren Ann, Shalom Hanoch, Radiohead. In
the adjacent dining room, in the kitchen, certain guests (more friends) are
invited to participate, to modulate the environment. “I need my interces-
sors to express myself, and they could never express themselves without
me: we are always many at work, even when it’s not obvious” (Deleuze
1995: 125). The intercessor is a complex singularity that activates a process,
a force that acts as a differential within an ongoing movement of thought.
The intercessor: the felt force that activates the threshold between think-
ing and feeling.
Thought gathers in the work. It is the event of the work’s unfolding.
Not into language, but in painting, on a canvas that seeks to activate
a new way of seeing, a new effort at participation. The intercessor pro-
pels thought, gives it a place to land, across works. St. John the Baptist’s
landing spreads thought across Ettinger’s canvas, making felt an unset-
tling contiguity: “Distance—the face of these lines” (Ettinger 2010). Lines,
fielding.
Ettinger’s work brushes against the gaze without relying upon it. The
friend cannot be represented. The Monet lies open, not to be looked at, but
to be thought-felt. A kind of “involuntariness in the seeing” (Ettinger 2010).
“Painting is not the image; painting is not the visual” (Ettinger 1993, 72).
The seeing happens almost by accident, spiriting across tremulous color
lines—traces—that are less visual than vibrational: lines fielded.
Vibrations are of time more than in time: they make time as they take
it, moving the image toward what cannot quite be seen in the seeing. The
intercessor, the friend, activates these vibratory tendencies, creating an
intensive passage between past and future outsides, the canvas a complex
polyphony.
The outside does not exist as such. It participates, it activates. It is always
and only relational. Intensive interval contributive to an event in-forming,
the outside captivates a process. It makes felt the virtual share of the actu-
ally perceived. It is an ally, a germ of unease, a friendly if troubling inter-
loper that co-inhabits all tendings toward form, an essentially “unformed
element of forces” (Deleuze 1988: 43).
The outside invites thought to linger in the elasticity of a taking-
form: thought not as already- constituted but as a force for creative
thinking-feeling.
No Tit le Ye t
66
If It Could Be Said, It Would Not Have to Be Painted

The friend is an uncanny presence. Non-I, more-than human: the friend
is always a new species, created for just this or that processual occasion.
The field of creation is not populated by subjects predefined. The event
of the work’s contiguities, the event of the work’s excess of form or
figure—this is the subject. Today, the subject may take the form of a line,
a line that is never quite straight, never quite horizontal, that stretches
across this and that canvas, that moves with an outside that propels it,
tuning to light. Tomorrow, the subject may come of an aria that activates
a new mobility in the line. The subject evolves, and with it a dynamic per-
ceptual field. This field is replete with relational tendencies, thoughts in
the feeling. It is replete with itself.
Ettinger paints the field, but is also painted by it. “I allow [the paint-
ings] to paint me” (Ettinger 2010). In this transformation, the artist herself
is transformed. She is eye, hand, body, but she is also movement, tendency,
thought, feeling. She moves-with the transformation, at pains to find an
unspoken language—a language of traces, of vibrations and resonances—to
articulate what cannot quite be seen, what remains, always, to some extent
not only ineffable, but essentially imperceptible.
If it could be said, it would not have to be painted. For Bracha Ettinger
is also a writer.
A co-poiesis is occurring here. Painter painted painting. Field fielded
fielding. The intercessor thresholding, differentializing. An ephemeral com-
munity at work not-yet-again, a coming community that attends to the
fact that the outside is a threshold. “Not another space that resides beyond
a determinate space [but . . .] the passage, the exteriority that gives it
access—in a word [. . .] its face” (Agamben 1993, 68).
The act of painting, the painting’s act, creates an imperceptible face, a
spectral opening, an outside that trembles from within, appearing in the
disappearance of a process that for more than twenty years has privileged
this uncanny threshold.
Face as co-constitutive yawning abyss that activates and populates, that
faces and defaces, that folds and expresses, making the outside felt, face as
that unfigure that never quite comes face-to-face, its facing a continuous
appearance-disappearance across series.6
Coming-in.
The face exceeds the I, exceeds the human relation. As friend, the face
passages
Bracha Ettinger, No Title Yet, Number 2—St. Anne, 2003–2009.
68
from the outside cleaves the figure asunder, cutting into the comfort of
knowing where this or that vision, this or that memory, is headed. Spectral
faciality as co-poietic, a co-composition with the forces of a seriation—a
speciation—in the making.
The friend, “indissociably what is closest and farthest away” (Foucault
1999, 2, 164). With, across, and outside.
Distance in Proximity
An unsettling of what might otherwise demand to be seen, the friend cre-
ates an uneasy disturbance in the field. The friend is only an ally insofar
as it contributes to a thinking-feeling tremulously poised on the edge of
what cannot quite be thought, felt, said, or painted. The intercessor car-
ries the power of the false: a noncorrespondence between the emergent
act and its expected expression that keeps the act in nonresemblance to
itself. “These powers of the false that will produce truth” (Deleuze 1995,
126), this is what the intercessors are.
The intercessor is a tending-forth, a force of expression without peer. It
comes from the outside, attracted by conditions for its shaping. Coming
in, it shifts the work toward its own uneasy outside. This outside is inten-
sive, tightly wound in its interloping, in the interweaving of elastic rela-
tions with all else incipiently in-act.
Monet as such—as painter, as impressionist, as “artist” predefined—is
not the friend. His greening is the intercessor. Greening is the force that
extends beyond Monet into a perceptual tendency—a violeting, per-
haps—as it enters Ettinger’s work. It is not so much that the trees in Mon-
et’s Water Lily Pond are “green” or that faces in Ettinger come out “violet.”
The green trees, the violet faces, activating a tendency in the work toward a
more-than of color, an unseen vibrational light. Toward a crystalline state.
We see the canvas as though through a crystal, clouding, coloring. We see
not color as such but resonances, intervals, cuttings-in. We see greening,
beyond representation. Less in color or as line, than as a formative force-
effect that emerges when the process takes over, a precarious balancing
between what is seen, thought, and felt. Greening, violeting as the force
for activation that creates a bridge between two works participating in a
shared outside.
Return to Monet’s Water Lily Pond. Go beyond the trees and the water
lilies and see what even the painting itself cannot quite conceive. Feel-
see its taking-time across generations. Feel-see how its color, white, and
passages
69
vibrational light creates an opening for resonance that exceeds this or

that painting, this or that form of art, that exceeds even the histories they
belong to. “The history of painting comes and goes and in the end doesn’t
really matter much” (Ettinger 2010). See-feel the work as a force for the
thinking of what, in the making, could not quite have been thought, in
a more-than of representation. See the work beyond the notion of what
“Monet” as “impressionist” could or intended to achieve. See the work
working in the relational interval of its co-composing with the outside of
thought, in the now of artistic exploration. “To think is to create—there
is no other creation—but to create is first of all to engender ‘thinking’ in
thought” (Deleuze 1994: 147). In painting.
Now turn to da Vinci and take note that friends do not necessarily
resemble one another. In St. John the Baptist, it is more difficult to over-
look the form, the figure, the face. How could this salient figure in Etting-
er’s incessant disappearing of the figure? But look again. Note where
the figure is placed on the canvas. In fact, St. John the Baptist is not in the
center. The background occupies the center. Note how the figure frames
the background, the head to the left and the finger to the right. What is
it framing? It is framing the intensely unseen, or with-seen of the back-
ground foregrounding. Caught in this vibration, the figure is no doubt as
much light as form or face.
Now turn to Ettinger’s No Title Yet, No. 1—St. John the Baptist and note
that the friend is never represented, its tendencies never absorbed into a
form or a figure. The friend remains a force for thought. And yet there are
contiguities, if you approach the works in the register of thinking-feeling.
Note the tremulous foregrounding-backgrounding in this image and espe-
cially how the white is never fully a presence or simply an absence, how
it mists, how it moves, a shivering that comes forth, a shivering attuned,
perhaps, to the force of the foregrounding of the background in Da Vin-
ci’s painting, a force less figural than intensive, less form than mobility.
The intercessor: a vibratory intensity, felt-thought, that refuses to let the
work stand still.
What cannot stand still in Ettinger’s work is not simply figure or form.
It is the line: line becoming figurably indiscernible. Reduce yourself “to an
abstract line, a trait, in order to find [a] zone of indiscernibility with other
traits” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 280). “Distance—The tree of this green,
the face of these lines” (Ettinger 1993, 9).
No Tit le Ye t
Claude Monet, Water
Lilies and Japanese
Bridge, 1899.
Photograph: Bruce M.
White. Reproduced by
permission of Princeton
University Art Museum /
Art Resource, NY.
Leonardo da Vinci, St John

the Baptist. Musée du Louvre
Paris. Alfredo Dagli Orti /
The Art Archive at Art
Resource, NY.
Bracha Ettinger, No Title Yet, Number 1—Saint John the Baptist,
2003–2009. Reproduced courtesy of the artist.
72
Distance in proximity. You must stand close: the paintings are small,
intricate.
Think-feel the indiscernible in action, the becoming-imperceptible of
the I, the trembling of an outside that is never quite there, for the seeing.
This is not to say that the figure is radically excluded. The figure is there, in
act: continuously disappearing. This is the work’s ethos, its politics: attend
to the appearing, to the more-than of the disappearance, to the suspen-
sion between the two.
The outside is suspended within the work in an appearing-disappearing
that beckons to attention. Attending and art-making are aspects of the
same process. To bring the non-I in, to paint with friends, is to become
attentive to how the friends paint in you. Friends in the third-person sin-
gular, impersonal, as in phrases like “it rains”: it greens, it faces, it lines, it
lights. The impersonal as the force that attends to a politics in the making,
an ephemeral community, to come, that sees beyond the look. “Bending
the line so we manage to live upon it, with it: a matter of life and death”
(Deleuze 1995, 111).
series three
Photography Xerography Scanography
The painting process moves through a series of material operations. In the
earlier series, the original image is worked photographically. Its working is
then rebegun in the operation of the photocopier, by whose xerographic
means it loses its status as the original. The repeatability of photocopy-
ing enables the working to rebegin again. The same image that moved
into Autistwork, No. 1 reenters in Eurydice, No. 23. The faces and their fig-
ures return, under transformation. Painting operations then take over, in
almost as machinic a way as the photographic and xerographic operations
the painting process relays. Brushstrokes line across the paper, mounted on
canvas. Always right to left, over and over again. Some of the toner grains
are taken up in the pigment of the oil paint. Vertical brushstrokes cloud
the lines. Fingers trouble the brushstrokes, smudging. The brushstrokes line
again, over the top, over and again, with ceaseless, rhythmic persistence,
day after day, year after year.
“Something starts to happen” (Ettinger 2010). The contours of the faces
and figures disappear into the rhythm, then reappear, as if by accident.
And drift. The faces and figures may well shift position. Their contours
passages
Bracha Ettinger, Autistwork, Number 1, 1993.
74
may morph. Facial elements may invade the figure, as in Autistwork No. 1,
where an arm and shoulder sprout the appearance of an eye. It is less that
the faces and figures are painted than that they reemerge, of themselves,
from the painting process.
“Sometimes two paintings from different series based on the same image
call to each other” (Ettinger 2010). The artist may then move from one
painting to another, brushstroking the painting “in relation to part of
the last painting that was set aside to move to the present one” (Ettinger
2010). This is done without direct visual reference. Not by gaze. It is not the
look that transfers the face from one painting to another.7 The painting’s
figures are allowed to resonate in each other, through the material opera-
tions of the painting process to which they mutually, serially belong. The
figures transfer themselves, in the process. This is not the artist’s volition.
“The same face may appear,” under transformation, “in different parts of
different paintings. The faces are transconnected. Figures get lost, then are
refound in a different place” (Ettinger 2010).
A face from outside the process may cut into the thread of transcon-
nection, “friending” the process. The face of da Vinci’s St. John the Baptist,
unlooked upon in an open book beside the easel, suddenly “comes out
from a displaced Eurydice face” (Ettinger 2010). The paintings/series open
onto their outside. Through the same operations by which they form an
intensive relational whole of their own in their openness to each other,
they take their outside in, opening the whole to the world at large. It is
not the form of the outside face or figure that enters the painting. What
enters is its friendly, troubling “vibration,” joining a different resonant
field, to new effect, from an effectively contiguous distance, with ingres-
sive formative force.
None of this, the artist says, is a matter of choice. She exercises her will-
power “mainly at the beginning, in the choice of which image to use”
(Ettinger 2010). Her persistence, her discipline, is to surrender to the paint-
ing process the decision as to when something will emerge, and what.
“Color,” she specifies, “is not part of the beginning decision . . . The lines
and the colors come together” in the relay from xerography to brushstrok-
ing. In each successive painting and series, she simply “starts with the same
color as the last, until the painting asks for another color” (Ettinger 2010).
The coloration evolves across the series. In Autistwork, No. 1, the color
is muted. There is vibratory movement but it is localized, tightly wound
passages
Bracha Ettinger, Eurydice Number 23, 1994-1998.
76
between the dark of the figural contours and a fuzziness clouding them.
Movement still. Faces, figures appear disappearing. Their forms flicker
between the foreground and the background. Since the movement comes
of an interplay between dark and light, contour and blurring, the field of
appearing-disappearing remains tied to form, if only residually (trace-form).
As the Autistwork series evolves (1993–94), paintings begin to ask for color.
From the clouding comes blue, then red. The conditions for a violeting.
A spectrum of color, a palette, is phasing in. Its coming starts moving the
series away from the interplay between dark and light, as attached to con-
tour and blurring, toward color and clouding.
The Eurydice series starts in the same palette. The colors thicken. The
emergent figural field- effects become less formed, more vibratory.
The vibration no longer comes from the figure vacillating between the
foreground and the background. It comes from color vibrating with itself,
foregrounding-backgrounding itself across the darkness that once was con-
tour but is no more. It doesn’t end there. Clouds of white start to emerge,
on their own account, shivering, released from any tie to fuzziness of con-
tour. In this series, the movement of the painting spreads across the can-
vas. Intensive movement over distances.
Then something happens again. The photocopier is replaced by the dig-
ital scanner. Scanography takes over from xerography. The painting pro-
cess moves scanographically into the No Title Yet series. No Title Yet Nos.
1–3 rebegin the painting process from scans of Eurydice No. 23. The scanner
is set so “the figural aspect does not transfer to the scan” (Ettinger 2010).
Nor does the color transfer. “The color in the scans is reduced to greys
and whites”: to cloudiness and white (not black and white, or dark ver-
sus light). Cloudiness and white: degrees of light. Whiteness self-relating.
What traces of faces and figures will emerge come from this interplay of
light. Few recognizable figures appear any longer. It is fitting that the series
has no title. Face becoming imperceptible: no name. No title—yet. “I” am
all the more not-there-yet. All the more no-more, and yet: to come. By
No Title Yet No. 3—Eurydice, the interplay of white with itself predominates.
This concentrates the movement without reducing its intensive spread.
The whole canvas vibrates white. The movement becomes pulsing. The
pulsing takes into itself the painting’s distances, enveloping them in its
own movement in place, in an all-over vibratory immediacy. Distance in
immediate proximity.
passages
77
The Adventures of White

The status of white in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s color theory closely
parallels its relational operation across Ettinger’s painting series. Goethe
defined white as “the fortuitously opaque flash of a pure transparency”
(1970, §495, 204).8 Translucid matter; or, pure light. “Light no longer has to
do with darkness, but with the transparent, the translucid, and the white”
(Deleuze 1986, 93).
The color field, for Goethe, emerges as an accident befalling transpar-
ency: it is a fortuitous becoming, emerging by degrees in a process of con-
tinuing variation. “Between transparency and the opacity of white there
exists an infinite number of degrees of cloudiness” (Deleuze 1986, 93). The
oppositions between light and dark, white and black, and even illumina-
tion and hue, which in traditional color theory are taken to prestructure
the field of vision, by this account emerge processually from a formative
accident of transparency: its departing from itself in a flash, into its own
cloudying. Transparency thickens, clouding. The clouding “accumulates.”
The accumulating attains white as its “extreme degree” (Goethe 1970, §146–
47, 60–61; §494, 204).
For Goethe, the color field is a qualitative continuum composed of an
infinity of variations, contingently unfolding. A continuum of qualitative
variation is best designated by its extreme degree, because it is the extreme
degree as pole of attraction that orients the moving continuously through.
The continuum of vision is the continuity of white’s tending toward its
own emergence from transparency. Transparency is the degree zero of
vision: pure visibility, itself unseeable, containing nothing but the power
of the continuum opaquely departing from it. The entire continuum can
be seen, from the perspective of its last degree of white, as the continuum
of white: the continuum of white’s diverse flashes of opacity self-relating,
yielding fortuitous degrees of cloudiness in endless variation, across differ-
ent unfolding series.
Color itself is an emergence falling on this continuum. For Goethe,
color does not emerge from darkness when light is cast upon a space to
illuminate its contents. Color emerges from colored shadow: from a cer-
tain clouded self-relating of light. “Color itself . . . is lumen opacatum [opac-
ified light]” (Goethe 1970, §69, 31). “For Goethe, all colors are shadows”
(Sorensen 2008, 161).9
Space itself does not preexist as the container for contents awaiting
No Tit le Ye t
78
illumination. The accumulation of transparency that is white is also “the sim-

plest, brightest, first, opaque occupation of space” (Goethe 1970, §147: 61).
Space is an emergence, also on the continuum. It emerges in the course
of white’s formative self-relating. Next come forms. Light is not shed on
preexisting forms. Figures emerge from the shadows variegating the color
field. They do not emerge from the shadows in the sense of appearing for
what they already are when shadow is dissipated by a shedding of light.
Figures form between regions of shadow. Their contours take at the bound-
ary between different degrees of clouding. They are the liminal relation
between regions of the formative field, seen as such. They are relational
beings of light—of transparency, translucency, and whiteness—with their
own degree of luminous quality. “Between the white of the veil and the
white of the background, the face holds itself up like a fish” in the tur-
bulent sea of white and color becoming. This figure “can lose its outline
in giving way to a soft focus . . . without losing anything of its reflecting
power” (Deleuze 1986, 93). It can drift, without losing its powers of reflect-
ing, its powers of relation.
It is not about “a struggle between light and dark, but light’s adventure
with white: . . . anti-Expressionism” (Deleuze 1986, 94).10
Virtual Light
At every phase in Ettinger’s painting process: adventures of light and white,
in fortuitously form-giving variation. It began machinically in the inter-
play between the transparency of the photocopier’s platen and the white
of the page. The fortuitous flash of unseen light set toner on the page, pro-
visionally fixed, still subject to drift. The emerging image was then con-
signed to the machinic motion of brushstroking, rebeginning the process a
second time. Faces and figures reemerge, through no choice of the artists’,
and shift, continue to drift, appearing-disappearing. The paintings ask for
color. Color emerges. Violeting, greening. The process rebegins again, with
the scanner. And again, with brushstroking. This time neither color nor
figures transfer. Clouds of white begin to emerge, released from preexisting
contour, self-relating. Traces of faces and figures, on the cusp of impercep-
tibility. Whitewashed colors. The canvas vibrates white. The movement
becomes a pulsing. The pulsing takes into itself the painting’s distances,
enveloping them in its own all-over vibratory immediacy—along with
the distance between this painting and the next and the one before, and
between series, and of the outside coming in. The entire painting process,
passages
79
its multiple rebeginnings coming to form, is enveloped in all immediacy:

distance in immediate proximity.
It is in this immediate distance in proximity that the “spirit” of the
paintings/series makes itself felt.
There is a transparency moving through the process that is not reducible
to the translucidity of a substance, such as the glass of the platen. Neither
is it reducible to the materiality of light, as pure visibility, giving to vision,
itself unseeable. There is a nonsensuous transparency that is one with the
thinking-feeling of the intensive relational whole of the painting process:
“A light that never was, on land or sea” (Whitehead 1967b, 87). Virtual light.
What is transparent in the painting process as an intensive relational
whole is one painting’s, a whole series’, a given face’s, direct relation to
another, and to one another, in immediate distance in proximity. One
resonates in the other without detouring along the axis of either specta-
torship or authorial intention. Each vibrates with the whole of the others,
without a mediating look between them. No decision comes between the
painting process and its perpetual rebeginnings’ continuing. The forma-
tive force of the painting process rearises, open-wholly, with each begin-
ning. No mediation—intercession. All distance pulsing in the dynamic
transparency of an immediate formative proximity. Becoming-crystalline
of the painting process.
What is thought in each painting, and across the series, is “the power
to rebegin at every instant, to self-rebegin, and thus to self-confirm in a
way that puts everything at stake again every time” (Deleuze 1986, 115).
This power to rebegin is “the consciousness of choice as steadfast spiritual
determination” (Deleuze 1986, 115). What chooses? Not I, no more—not
yet. Each and all chooses, every time, in the retracing-itself of an open pro-
cessual whole always still in the durational making. Anti-expressionism:
“The subjectivity is never ours, it is time itself, that is, the soul or the spirit,
the virtual” (Deleuze 1989, 82–83).
The power of the relational whole to rebegin constitutes a “spiritual
space where what we choose is no longer distinguishable from the choice”
(Deleuze 1986, 115). This is not a physical space, a space that materially
contains. It is a relationally reopening space, “identical to the power of the
spirit” (Deleuze 1986, 117).
Through the exercise of its power to choose itself, the painting pro-
cess becomes a formative force of thought. The painting process is its
own thinking-feeling subject, moving choosily across material operations,
No Tit le Ye t
80
choosing steadfastly in the moving, while remaining fortuitously, openly,

relationally irreducible to them. It moves from painting to painting,
machine to machine, through series, from form to trace, through phases
of color, to come out into its own, in clouds of painting-thinking thicken-
ing the transparency of the spiritual space of the open whole into a move-
ment of white self-relating.
The interplay between transparency and white that traverses the entire
process is the thinking that is painting. The color-phases that emerge across
the movement of this thinking-itself of painting are what gives it feeling,
and reimparts it to perception. Colors: thickenings in the interplay of light,
between transparency and white opacity, absorbing the vicissitudes of the
thinking process, radiating the feeling of it, registered in degrees of cold
and warmth.
If white is painting-thinking coming out into its own, the coloring of
the process “is affect itself” (Deleuze 1986, 118). “Pure virtuality doubling
as the affecting and the affected, ‘self-affection’ as the definition of time”
(Deleuze 1989, 83; translation modified). Feeling felt, thought feeling.
Color is thinking’s affective accompaniment. Its feeling friend.
Painting: thinking-feeling. Not imagining.
“I do not use imagination when painting” (Ettinger 2010).
At the limit, the painting process is “holographic” (Ettinger 2010): at the
same time as it makes a given image, thickens into an individual painting, it
makes “a mental image that opens onto an interplay of purely thought rela-
tions weaving a whole” (Deleuze 1986, 18). This purity of painting-thinking,
colorfully felt, “renders impotent the imagination” (Deleuze 1986, 48).11
For “the whole has become Simultaneity” (Deleuze 1986, 48). Time-
crystal. A duration not of time’s passing, but of its making taking painterly
form. Pulsing. Yet and again. No more is not the end of it.
Imagination suspended in the “immensity” of an “absolute domain of
luminous simultaneity, [. . .] of the changing whole that is Spirit” confirm-
ing itself, self-choosing (indistinguishably from what is chosen; Deleuze
1986, 48).
Moved by light.
passages
Part II
Propositions
0. Practice immanent critique

1. Construct the conditions for a speculative pragmatism
2. Invent techniques of relation
3. Design enabling constraints
4. Enact thought
5. Give play to affective tendencies
6. Attend to the body
7. Invent platforms for relation
8. Embrace failure
9. Practice letting go
10. Disseminate seeds of process
11. Practice care and generosity impersonally, as event-based political virtues
12. If an organization ceases to be a conduit for singular events of
collective becoming, let it die
13. Brace for chaos
14. Render formative forces
15. Creatively return to chaos
16. Play polyrhythms of relation
17. Explore new economies of relation
18. Give the gift of giving
19. Forget, again!
20. Proceed
83
84
“Good-Bye Condos, Hello Technological Arts”

The art and intellectual worlds in which we work, specifically in Montreal,
are visibly conflicted, as much within the academic institution as among
the many independent cultural producers contributing to the city’s inter-
national reputation as a creative haven. There is a general recognition that
the conditions for research and creative activity have significantly changed
with the rise of an increasingly speculative, high-turnover, innovation-
driven “knowledge economy.” The “creative capital” fueling the econ-
omy tends to derive from fluid forms of social and intellectual cooperation
often analyzed in terms of “immaterial labor,” defined as “the labor that
produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity” (Laz-
zarato 1996, 133).1 These forms of value-producing collaborative activity
tend, by nature, to overspill sectorial and disciplinary boundaries, and to
fundamentally call into question the traditional split between “theory” or
“pure research” on the one hand and “practice” or “applied research” on
the other. Problematizations of that split, of course, are nothing new. What
is new, in our context, is the extent to which policies intended to facilitate
collaboration across the divides have been prioritized in government cul-
tural and academic policies and in university structures. The way this has
been done has created real opportunities—but also highly troubling align-
ments with the neoliberal economy.
In Canada, funding priorities have increasingly been angled toward
team-based “interdisciplinary” research. Research projects are asked to jus-
tify themselves not only in terms of their academic value for their field but
for their promised contributions to the advancement of Canadian society
as a whole. Given the neoliberal global context, in which the category of
“society” is increasingly subsumed under that of the “economy” (Foucault
2008), it has become more and more common to hear research results
referred to in the economic vocabulary of “deliverables” produced for the
benefit of “stakeholders.” Highly capitalized “centers of excellence” have
been perched atop the university departmental structure, each advertised
as “world class” with a mandate to address one or more issues of “strategic
importance” to the wealth of the nation.
The arts have not been spared from the trend toward the neoliber-
alization of research.2 In 2003, a new funding category titled “research-
creation” was introduced in Canada to encourage hybrid forms of activity
promising to capture for research the creative energies of artists working
propositions
85
within the academic institution.3 The turn toward the institutionalization

of research-creation was framed in interdisciplinary academic terms: “to
bridge the gap between the creative and interpretive disciplines and link
the humanities more closely with the arts communities.” There was a clear
emphasis on the role arts can and do play in the wider cultural field and
a recognition of “the potentially transformative nature of research under-
taken by artist-researchers.”4 At the same time, the program set in place
a structure of standardized quality control and an accounting of quanti-
tative results of the kind the arts have historically resisted.5 In the neo-
liberal context, the emphasis on making art-work accountable has the
consequence, whether explicitly intended or not, of formatting artistic
activity for more directly economic forms of delivery to stakeholders. The
neoliberal idea is never far that artistic activity is most productive, and
socially defensible, when it feeds into industry tie-ins helping fuel the
“creative economy.” Moves within the academy toward institutionalizing
research-creation are inevitably implicated in a larger context where the
dominant tendencies are toward capitalizing creative activity. In that con-
text, research-creation makes economic sense as a kind of laboratory not
only for knowledge-based product development but for the prototyping
of new forms of collaborative activity expanding and diversifying the pool
of immaterial labor.
The same period in Montreal saw the inception of Hexagram, a
multimillion-dollar “institute for research-creation in media arts and tech-
nology.”6 As originally instituted, Hexagram took the form of a private–
public partnership with an explicit orientation toward tie-ins between
university-based art practitioners and the culture industries as they were
undergoing rapid digitization. This orientation was further emphasized in
the 2005 move of Hexagram to a newly commissioned building dubbed
the “Integrated Engineering, Computer Science and Visual Arts Complex”
(“EV Building”). Developments like the foundation of Hexagram and the
associated “integration” of the arts within an engineering “complex” served
to further complicate the old split between “theory/pure research” and
“practice/applied research” with a new divide between “traditional” art
and “new media” art. During this period, projects involving digital media
began to take funding priority over traditional forms. This is in no small
part because they employ the same technological platforms as the increas-
ingly computerized economy. Among other things, this construes Hexa-
gram’s “art outputs” as products that are potentially patentable, saleable
Fo r T h o ught i n t h e Ac t
86
outside the art market narrowly defined. The faintest promise of patent-
ability delivers creative activity to the category of “intellectual property”
(IP). Where art becomes IP, the productively contentious issues—ethical,
aesthetic, political, ontological—that have historically played themselves
out around the place and nature of the “work of art” are backgrounded in
favor of the economic annexation of the sphere of creative activity and the
value-adding capture of its products.7
The economization of creative activity in Montreal is not confined to
academic institutions. It begins to literally change the face of the city. In
2006, the city of Montreal embarked on a large-scale redevelopment of a
central-city district into a new Quartier des Spectacles.8 The plan was dedi-
cated to solidifying the city’s marketing position internationally as an arts-
and-culture “Festival City.” The first visible step was a “lighting plan” to
create a signage system to help rebrand the central-city area targeted for
reinvigoration, which included the red-light district.9 The lighting project
experiments with marking the urban landscape to make its repurposing
visible, with the light motif attracting passersby to key sites. The red light
of the district expands its connotation toward a vividness of experience
open in a variety of forms to all who walk the streets, bringing to the fore
local artists’ creative input on lighting and urban design. Here, research-
creation extends to urban “experience design” with a mission to facilitate
another industry tie-in: the tourism and hospitality industries. Experience
design in light, annunciatory field-effect of a concrete remobilization of a
coming arena of urban operation, has shown the way. The spotlight then
turned to major construction and renovation projects as the Quartier des
Spectacles’s urban redevelopment scheme entered its central phase. Art-
research in practice has contributed to the opening of a major portfolio
in the city’s economic strategy. Arts-related redevelopment strategies have
even spread to the rural areas of Quebec. Headline about redevelopment
plans for a southern Quebec ski station fallen on hard times because of cli-
mate change: “25-Million-Dollar Tourist Project: Good-Bye Condos, Hello
Technological Arts.”10
Proposition 0
Practice Immanent Critique
At the heart of Montreal’s Quartier des Spectacles lies the Society for Art and
Technology (SAT).11 The SAT grew from a successful organizing effort on the
propositions
87
part of key personalities in the budding electronic music and digital arts
community of Montreal toward hosting the international symposium of
the Inter-Society for Electronic Arts (Montreal, 1995).12 From this seed, it has
grown over the years into a central institution in the arts-and-culture mix of
Montreal and become a magnet institution in the Quartier des Spectacles,
all the while taking care to retain its community-based ethos and openness
to experimentation. Its activities have expanded to include research pro-
grams into new design practices, the creation of digital platforms in part-
nership with independent producers as well as university-based researchers,
technical training programs for cultural producers, cohosting of arts fes-
tivals, organization of public lecture series and colloquia, and projects to
reconceive the form and function of the art gallery and to reconceptual-
ize the documenting and archiving of interactive and ephemeral forms of
creative expression.
In the early years, we chose to base our projects at the SAT. Its posi-
tioning at the heart of Montreal’s digital culture, coupled with its contin-
ued commitment to traditions of artistic experimentation and openness
to community-based cultural activism, made it a resonating chamber for the
tensions—and potentials—afoot in the complex, shifting context we have
been describing. However reticent we were of the direction many develop-
ments in the larger neoliberal context were taking, we felt a strong affinity
with the creative energy and conceptual questioning at the heart of ven-
tures initiated by the SAT, and were adamant about working in connection
with community-based initiatives and not solely from the safe haven of
the university. We were not interested in simply taking a critical stance,
as if as university-based researchers/artists we stood outside the situation
and did not ourselves participate in the new economy and in our own way
profit from it. We wanted to work in the thick of the tensions—creative,
institutional, urban, economic—and build out from them.
We were looking to inhabit otherwise, to practice what we call, follow-
ing Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, an “immanent” critique. An imma-
nent critique engages with new processes more than new products, from
a constructivist angle. It seeks to energize new modes of activity, already
in germ, that seem to offer a potential to escape or overspill ready-made
channelings into the dominant value system. The strategy of immanent
critique is to inhabit one’s complicity and make it turn—in the sense in
which butter “turns” to curd. Our project was to try to do our small part to
curdle “research-creation’s” annexation to the neoliberal economy.
88
Thinking in Action
The category of “research-creation” was implemented in the larger Cana-
dian institutional setting without a strong concept of how creative practice
and theoretical research interpenetrate. At what level and in what modes
of activity do they come together? In the absence of a rigorous rethinking
of that question, the new category could do little more than become
an institutional operator: a mechanism for existing practices to interface
with the neoliberalization of art and academics. Key questions such as how
the process of art alters what we might understand as research, or how art
creates concepts, are backgrounded as institutionally driven issues take the
fore, such as by what standards research-creation might be accredited.
The drift is toward the professionalization of artistic activities, implying
among other things the implementation of quantitative productivity mea-
sures.13 The danger, we felt, was that research-creation, once institutional-
ized in accordance with established criteria, would boil down to little more
than grouping traditional disciplinary research methodologies under the
same roof. This existing “interdisciplinary” tendency—where collaboration
really means that disciplines continue to work in their own institutional
corners much as before, meeting only at the level of research results—
would do little to create new potential for a thinking-with and -across
techniques of creative practice. Instead of asking how research has always
been a modality of practice with its own creative edge, and how creative
practice stages thought in innovative ways—how each already infuses the
other—the instituted meeting between research and creation easily set-
tles into a communication model revolving around the delivery of results
among conventional research areas. For example, new sociological find-
ings on the impact of technological systems, or on newly developed and
as yet socially untested systems, might be made available to artists to see
how they might creatively “apply” them (a potentially profitable exercise
in such areas as gaming). We are of course not alone in exploring the rec-
iprocity of research and creation toward a truly transdisciplinary explora-
tion of new territories of practice.14 It is just that the counterexamples are
numerous enough and prominent enough to produce a notable level of
skepticism, if not outright cynicism, in certain quarters.15
It was precisely this sense that research-creation was troubled from birth
that we took as our starting point. What if we started over? What if we took
the hyphenation seriously, seeing it as an internal connection—a mutual
propositions
89
interpenetration of processes rather than a communication of products?

This approach would posit research-creation as a mode of activity all its
own, occurring at the constitutive level of both art practice and theoreti-
cal research, at a point before research and creation diverge into the insti-
tutional structures that capture and contain their productivity and judge
them by conventional criteria for added value. At that prebifurcation level,
making would already be thinking-in-action, and conceptualization a prac-
tice in its own right. The two, we proposed, would intersect in technique,
technique understood here as an engagement with the modalities of expres-
sion a practice invents for itself. Our speculative starting point was that this
meeting in technique, to be truly creative, would have to be constitutively
open ended. The kind of results aimed at would not be preprogrammed.
They would be experimental, emergent effects of an ongoing process.
Experimental practice embodies technique toward catalyzing an event
of emergence whose exact lineaments cannot be foreseen. As for Gilbert
Simondon, the concept of technique as we use it includes the idea of the
conditions through which a work or a practice comes to definite techni-
cal expression. Technique is therefore processual: it reinvents itself in the
evolution of a practice. Its movement-toward definite expression must be
allowed to play out. Technique is therefore immanent: it can only work
itself out, following the momentum of its own unrolling process. This
means that what is key is less what ends are pre-envisioned—or any kind
of subjective intentional structure—than how the initial conditions for
unfolding are set. The emphasis shifts from programmatic structure to cat-
alytic event conditioning.
This idea of research-creation as embodying techniques of emergence
takes it seriously that a creative art or design practice launches concepts
in-the-making. These concepts-in-the making are mobile at the level of
techniques they continue to invent. This movement is as speculative
(future-event oriented) as it is pragmatic (technique-based practice).
Proposition 1
Construct the Conditions for a Speculative Pragmatism
The Problem
What new forms of collaborative interaction does this research-creation-
based speculative pragmatism imply? What kinds of initial conditions
90
are necessary? What does it mean to organize for emergence? What are
the implications of this emergent-event orientation for established forms
of interaction, such as the conference, artist’s talk, or gallery exhibition?
first iteration
The SenseLab was founded in 2004 by Erin Manning with the aim of
exploring this problematic field. Dedicated as it was to a practice of the
event, the SenseLab avoided defining itself in a formal organizational struc-
ture. It was conceived as a flexible meeting ground whose organizational
form would arise as a function of its projects, and change as the projects
evolved. Process would be emphasized over deliverable products. In fact,
process itself would be the SenseLab’s product. Membership would be based
on elective affinities. Anyone who considered himself or herself a member
was one. The result is a shifting mix of students and professors, theorists
and practitioners, from a wide range of disciplines and practices.
The first SenseLab event grew from a challenge arising from discussions
with Isabelle Stengers,16 who expressed as a criterion for her participa-
tion in an academic event that it be just that: an event. In our conversa-
tions with Stengers, it became clear that for an “event” to be an event, it
is necessary that a collective thinking process be enacted that can give rise
to new thoughts through the interaction on site. It is equally important
that potential for what might occur not be pre-reduced to the delivery of
already-arrived-at conclusions. The SenseLab took as its challenge to adapt
this criteria to research-creation. What makes a research-creation event?
Given the research-creation context in which we were working, it would
prove crucial to avoid not only the communication model but also any
paradigm of “application,” whether it be practical results from existing
research and design disciplines as applied by artists to their work in their
own field, or conceptual frameworks as applied to art or technology by
philosophers or other theoreticians. Concept-work could not adopt an
external posture of description or explanation. It would have to be acti-
vated collaboratively on site, entering the relational fray as one creative
factor among others. The term “research-creation” was retained as a key
term for an exploratory openness in this activity of producing new modes
of thought and action. How to resituate the hyphen of research-creation
to locate it as much within philosophical inquiry as artistic practice and
between them both and other fields?17
The first event, Dancing the Virtual, took place in summer 2005 as the
propositions
91
inaugural initiative in a series of events collectively titled Technologies

of Lived Abstraction.18 This first event approached the problem from the
angle of movement, specifically the question of what constitutes a “move-
ment of thought.”19 The organizing refrain was a formula from philosopher
José Gil, who was invited to participate in the event, that “what moves as
a body returns as the movement of thought” (Gil 2002, 124). This concept
holds that every movement of the body is doubled by a virtual movement-
image expressing its abstract form, in its unfolding. The dimension of virtu-
ality is at once the movement’s potential for thought and, associated with
that, its potential for repetition and variation. Pragmatically, this concept
built a self-referential dimension into the event. The event would gather into
itself an awareness of its own abstract dimensions, accompanying its every
move with a protoconceptualization in action: a thinking flush with its
unfolding that would contribute to the self-piloting of what would happen.
The goal was in no way to reach agreement among participants on phil-
osophical issues concerning movement, the virtual, and embodiment. The
goal, rather, was to stage those issues, live, in the on-site interaction, to see
if the interfusion of concept-work and embodied interaction would bring
something new to participants’ practices, on the level of their own tech-
niques or their techniques for joining their practice with those of others.
Actual movement exercises were part of the activities.20 Philosophers were
asked to put their thinking into movement, at the same time as dancers/
choreographers were asked to move with their thinking (to mention just
the two practices present that were most directly connected to the pivotal
question of the event).
Proposition 2
Invent Techniques of Relation
It was clear from the start that to succeed in getting philosophers out of
their seats and put their thinking bodies into movement, and getting danc-
ers untrained in philosophy to engage rigorously with difficult theoretical
texts, without a crippling self-consciousness on either side, careful atten-
tion would have to be paid to the techniques used to design the event
itself. The idea was that there are “techniques of relation”—devices for cat-
alyzing and modulating interaction—and that these comprise a domain of
practice in their own right. It would be the work of the event organizers
to experiment with inventing techniques of relation for research-creation,
92
not only as part of a practice of event-design, but as part of a larger “eth-

ics of engagement.” The techniques would have to be structured, in the
sense of being tailored to the singularity of this event, and improvised,
taking the desires and expertise of the event’s particular participants into
account, inviting their active collusion in determining how the event
would transpire, so that in the end it would be as much their event as the
organizing collective’s.
The success of Dancing the Virtual would be measured not by any
easily presentable product produced during its three-day duration, but
by whether there was follow-up on its process afterward: in other words, by
whether the event itself had set anything in motion. The follow-up might
take various forms: unforeseen cross-practice collaborations initiated at the
event, other groupings elsewhere taking up the concept and practice of
techniques of relation in the context of research-creation or other hybrid
meeting grounds, and increased international networking between groups
already working along similar lines. The focus in the creation of techniques
of relation was on catalyzing a continuing collective culture dedicated to an
ethics of engagement. We wanted to set into motion something that could
grow and take us with it. In short, the event would be evaluated according
to what it seeded rather than what it harvested.
This orientation made the event largely unfundable by granting agen-
cies. The decision was made not to change the nature of the event in
order to qualify it for government financing. This meant that if it was to
come to pass, it would only be by the will and resourcefulness of its pro-
spective participants, its community partners like the SAT, and its Sense-
Lab organizing collective.21
Proposition 3
Design Enabling Constraints
Since the goal was to collaboratively “catalyze” movement toward the

emergence of the new, the role of the techniques of relation would not be
to “frame” the interaction in the traditional sense. The techniques would
be for implanting opportunities for creative participation, which would
be encouraged to take on their own shape, direction, and momentum in
the course of the event. The role of the techniques of relation was to cre-
ate conditions conducive to the event earning its name as an event. These
propositions
93
techniques would have to be of two kinds: techniques to set in place propi-

tious initial conditions, and techniques to modulate the event as it moved
through its phases. The paradigm was one of conditioning, rather than
framing. The difference is that conditioning consists in bringing co-causes
into interaction, such that the participation yields something different
from either acting alone. The reference is to complex emergent process,
rather than programmed organization. Emergent process, dedicated to
the singular occurrence of the new, agitates inventively in an open field.
Programmed organization, on the other hand, functions predictably in a
bounded frame and lends itself to reproduction.
A term was adopted for relational technique in its event-condition-
ing role: “enabling constraint.” An enabling constraint is positive in its
dynamic effect, even though it may be limiting in its form/force narrowly
considered. Take, for example, an improvised dance movement. The major
constraint is the action of gravity on the body. As a cause, gravity is impla-
cable, its effects entirely predictable. But add to gravity another order of
cause, and in the interaction between the orders of determination some-
thing new and unforeseen may emerge. A horizontal movement cutting
across the vertical plane of gravity can produce a certain quantum of lift
temporarily counteracting gravity’s downward vector. The arc of the jump
will be a collaboration between the action of gravity and the energy and
angular momentum of the horizontal movement acting as co-causes. Add
to the mix priming of the dancing bodies through techniques for entering
into the movement and modulating it on the fly (including techniques of
attention and concentration, as well as conceptual orientations) and a third
order of co-causality actively enters in. Gravity has been converted from a
limitative constraint to an enabling constraint playing a positive role in the
generation of an event favorable to the improvisional emergence of a novel
dance movement. This model of the enabling constraint was adopted for
every aspect of the event-generating strategies for Dancing the Virtual and
was retained for all subsequent events.
We wanted at all costs to avoid the voluntaristic connotations often car-
ried by words like “improvisation,” “emergence,” and “invention.” There
would be no question of just “letting things flow,” as if simply unconstrain-
ing interaction were sufficient to enable something “creative” to happen. In
our experience, unconstrained interaction rarely yields worthwhile effects.
Its results typically lack rigor, intensity, and interest for those not directly
94
involved, and as a consequence are low on follow-on effects. Effects cannot

occur in the absence of a cause. The question is what manner of causation
is to be activated: simple or complex; functionally proscribed or catalyzing
of variation; linear or relational (co-causal)?22
In the course of preparing Dancing the Virtual, we came to realize that
we had embarked upon a highly technical process that could not func-
tion purely through free improvisation. This led to the emphasis on a cer-
tain notion of structured improvisation building on enabling constraints:
“enabling” because in and of itself a constraint does not necessarily provoke
techniques for process, and “constraint” because in and of itself openness
does not create the conditions for collaborative exploration.
Setting up techniques of relation conditioned by enabling constraints
facilitating co-generation of effects is a thorough and exacting process. It
involved, in the case of Dancing the Virtual and all our subsequent events, a
full year’s preparation.23 A technique, in all creative practices, from dance to
art to writing and reading, involves practiced repetition and intensive
exchange. In the context of an event that seeks to create a generative
encounter between different modalities of practice, a technique involves
activating a passage between creative forces.
Techniques as we understand them do not depend exclusively on the
content of the practices but move across their respective processes at
the site of their potential multiplication. A dance practice, for instance,
will emerge across various registers. A movement exploration might
co-combine with a conceptual force—a word, an idea, a landscape—
influenced perhaps by past explorations and changed, probably, all along
its course by improvisational explorations that connect to the experi-
ment’s technical constraints. Similarly, a philosophical practice may
emerge in and across a reading–writing register that cannot be restricted
simply to content. Like the dance practice, the philosophical exploration
is a technicity in its own right, activated and activating across registers of
content and processual invention, moving incessantly between the rigor
of denotation and the force of expression. Each of our events seeks collec-
tively to find modalities of experimentation that connect practices at the
levels of their intensive creative force. This is done not in order to map
them onto one another, or to evaluate one in terms of another, but to
propose a co-causal thirdness of exploration that can be generative of new
modes of practice and inquiry.
propositions
95
Among the specific enabling constraints set in place for Dancing the Vir-
tual were the following:
1 A ban was set in place as regards presenting already-completed

work of whatever kind. This was not meant to imply that par-
ticipants would enter as blank slates. On the contrary, they
were encouraged to bring everything but completed work.
They were encouraged to come with all their passions, skills,
methods, and, most of all, their techniques, but without a pre-
determined idea of how these would enter into the Dancing
the Virtual event. To encourage this, each participant was asked
to bring something essential to his or her practice as an offer-
ing to the group: an object, a material, a keyword, a concep-
tual formula, a technical system. This relational technique was
dubbed the “(Im)material Potluck.” The offerings would be kept
on hand as a resource base for the event and would be called
on improvisationally as needed and desired. Their immediate
function would be as a gift to the group, as well as a kind of
calling card expressing something about the person and his or
her practice. This would facilitate entry into group interaction
from the angle not of who someone was (their status in a field,
their recognized achievements, the territory their achievements
staked out for them) but rather of what moved them. What
moved each participant became a potential co-cause of group
movements in the making.
2 Everyone was required to read the same selection of philo-

sophical texts in advance of the event. Certain periods of close
reading and discussion of the texts would be included among
the activities, both in small groups and in plenary session. This
was not intended to force agreement on theoretical issues. The
role of the readings was to give the entire group a shared set
of conceptual resources that could be collectively mobilized,
or used as pivots around which a recognition of different ap-
proaches would revolve. Whether collectively mobilizing or
differentiating, what was important was that everyone be on
the same page. To be avoided at all costs were general ideas and
96
preassumed positionings. All conceptual commentary would
have to create an effective link-in of some kind to the texts.
3 The ideas brought forth and the positionings effected would

have to be performed in connection with texts everyone had
read. This enabling constraint of “activating” ideas on site, in
and for the group interactions, was essential given the differ-
ences in participants’ backgrounds, as well as differences in age
and professional status. No common set of references could be
assumed. To prevent one group or individual from being si-
lenced or disqualified, each would be encouraged to “activate”
what they knew or could do in a way that was anchored in
a shared and always available print-based resource. This per-
formative anchoring of each person’s contribution was espe-
cially important for bringing philosophy into the co-causal
mix, given how potentially exclusionary philosophical lan-
guage may feel to those in other fields. But the same principle
applied to other areas as well: a simple movement exercise can
be as intimidating to the perpetually deskbound theorist as an
elaborate philosophical text is to the movement practitioner.
This gave rise to an emergent technique of relation. Despite
careful preparation, the philosophical plenaries at Dancing the
Virtual and subsequent events did have a tendency to become
just that: plenaries. In a quick regrouping after a Whitehead ple-
nary that seemed to silence the nonphilosophers in the room,
Andrew Murphie came up with a brilliant proposition: con-
ceptual speed dating. This technique of relation has since be-
come a mainstay not only at SenseLab events but in classrooms
across the network. The proposition is this: take half the group
and classify them as “posts.” Their job is to sit or stand or lie in
position in a circular formation at the edges of the room. The
other half are “flows.” As in speed dating, the flows move from
one post to another, clockwise, at timed intervals. Next, find
what Deleuze and Guattari call a “minor” concept—a concept
that activates the philosophical web of a text without drawing
attention to itself as a special term. This is where the real work
comes in: the concept has to be understated enough that it
has not yet entered common understanding and undergone
propositions
97
the generalization that comes with that, but it must be ac-
tive enough that the whole conceptual field of the work feeds
through it. For Dancing the Virtual, the minor concept chosen
was “terminus,” found in William James’s work (specifically
Essays in Radical Empiricism). “Terminus” is a term that is often
overlooked but is integral to the weave of James’s philosophy.
It refers to the tendency orienting the unfolding of an event as
it senses its potential completion and follows itself to its culmi-
nation. The terminus is a forward-driving force that carries an
event toward its accomplishment. It is an organizing force ex-
erted by the end, from the very beginning, and through every
step.24 For the conceptual speed dating, the group is given the
term, as well as a passage or page number to start from. At five-
minute intervals, the flows move from one post to another, try-
ing to sort out the concept. The force of the exercise plays itself
out not only in the working-through of the concept in pairs,
but perhaps even more so in the moving-forward to the next
pairing, where a discussion takes up again, already infused with
the previous conversations. This stages a collective thinking
process, as individuals’ ideas disseminate and mutate through
continually displaced pairings. In Dancing the Virtual, the
conceptual speed dating had a catalytic effect, giving the event
a pivot concept around which to unfold.
Proposition 4
Enact Thought
The constraint of “activation” was generalized as a rule against description

or reportage, in keeping with the principle that a generative encounter
could not be grounded prioritarily in content. We were concerned to create
techniques that were capable of intensifying the passage between different
modalities of experimentation, and specifically between small-and large-
group processes. The question was how to generate a process for passing-
between that did not deintensify what came before. The commonly used
technique of summary “reporting” to “explain” what happened in a small
group to the larger group tends to do little more than break the movement
between and dampen co-causal synergies. The performative was chosen
in this context as well, as a transitional mechanism. What happened in
98
a small-group session had to be activated in capsule form for the group

as a whole. If language were used for this, it had to be language that was
not simply descriptive or denotative, but conveyed a performative force.
A concept-working group, for example, might decide to reperform a dis-
cussion of a philosophical problem in the form of a movement exercise.
We were continually asking ourselves how to create modalities of transi-
tion that captured not the content of the last exercise (be it artistic or phil-
osophical) but its affective intensity (its generative force). The challenge
was to recreate tonalities of experience across modalities—to make felt the
intensity of thought in practice.
Proposition 5
Give Play to Affective Tendencies
The focus on liminal activities, on the active transitions between phases

of the event, had to take into account the inaugural passage: the initial pass-
ing of the threshold into the event. A major determinant to the success or
failure of the event would be what participants brought with them through
the threshold to the event in terms of their expectations about the com-
ing group interactions and their individual status and positioning within
them. How the initial entry is organized, and especially the physical lay-
out and affective tonality of the space into which participants enter, influ-
ences the postures that will be assumed. The manner of welcome and the
initial impression created of the space of participation are essential working
parts of the event machinery, not neutral accessories. Together they con-
stitute an apparatus of postural priming that embeds certain presupposi-
tions and anticipatory tendencies in the event’s unfolding. The challenge
was to disable participants’ habitual presuppositions—those tendencies
engrained in all of us by the conventional genres of interaction in the art
and academic worlds. Key was to find a mode of entry that opened the
field of participation to unforeseeable interactions without destabilizing
participants, rendering them reticent or defensive.
The passing of the threshold into the event would have to signal that
what was coming was different from the norm and that the usual rituals of
self-presentation and self-positioning based on achieved reputations and
disciplinary stature would not be encouraged. This would have to be done
in an inviting and even comforting way. A kind of hospitable estrangement
was necessary. For the welcome, the model of hospitality was consciously
propositions
99
adopted, rather than the more usual one of gate keeping and accreditation
(registration, identification by institutional affiliation). But what we wanted
to stress was not our hospitability, our generosity, but the event’s own emer-
gent modalities of hospitality. Participants were individually greeted and
ushered past the threshold, where a space awaited that contained none
of the expected accoutrements—no tables at the front for a presenter, no
chairs in rows for an audience, no podium, no stage. Instead, a number of
“affordances” presented themselves that did not take an immediately recog-
nizable form, so that they had to be arrived at through exploration (for
example, comfortable seating opportunities without actual seats). These
were thought of as “attractors.” They were meant to encourage a certain
active self-organizing on the participants’ part even as they arrived, based
on an affective pull toward particular affordance rather than a prestruc-
tured setting into place.
This principle was also used to self-organize the first division of the par-
ticipants into small work groups. Elements within the space were draped
with colorful fabrics of alluring textures (primarily fake furs). To divide
the group, participants were asked to move to the fabric attractor that
most spoke to them. The resulting groups were thus formed on the basis
of affinity, a common affective tending, rather than preinstituted catego-
ries (rank, discipline, content area of expertise). In Deleuze and Guattari’s
vocabulary, this focused the unfolding of the event on “minor” tendential
movements rather than “major” structural categories. The overall affective
tonality participants were tuned toward in their induction into the event
was playfulness—play being the minor tendency contained by every insti-
tuted structure, whose unleashing softens or disables postural default set-
tings. A degree of play creates the potential for the emergence of the new,
not in frontal assault against structure but at the edges and in its pores.
Participants of course still had their disciplinary stature, position in their
fields, and postural habits. This was not denied. The point was not to create
a fictional equalizing, as if we could simply step outside of structure. There
is no denying that we all need structure of some kind for our professional
and personal survival. We took to heart Deleuze and Guattari’s warnings
about the dangers of too-sudden or brutal “deterritorialization” and the
need for “sobriety” (which we understood in terms of the centrality of
technique). The point was not to force a heroic struggle against structure,
which too often leads into a “black hole” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 161).
25
The goal was altogether more modest: to prime people’s capacity for
10 0
creative play in a way that directed them to the event’s own hospitality.
This orientation in the event, we hoped, might give rise to reiterable move-
ments of creative collaboration that would continue beyond this phase of
the event process.
Proposition 6
Attend to the Body
Attention flags. Bodies fatigue. Stomachs growl. It is remarkable the extent

to which the conventional genres of artistic and academic encounter disre-
gard these basic facts. It was important to us to attend to these constraints
and build them into each event through a commitment to managing this
most prosaic “biopolitical” dimension of the encounter, in as hospitable
a manner as possible. Food was plentiful and presented in way that called
forth the rituals of conviviality surrounding shared eating in noninstitu-
tional settings. (Food as a technique of relation would become a motif for
subsequent events.) Dancing the Virtual started a tradition that carried over
into all our events: a napping affordance. A sleeping tent, with mattresses
and pillows for a floor, was set up in a corner of the space as a place for
jet-lagged participants to regenerate, or as a quiet refuge for those feeling
overwhelmed or socially challenged by the event’s intensity. The sleeping
tent created an internal threshold to the event’s outside. Participants could
manage their own rhythm of withdrawal and reentry to the proceedings
without entirely absenting themselves.
second iteration
Proposition 7
Invent Platforms for Relation
Dancing the Virtual was successful in the sense that it did create a momen-
tum beyond itself, toward the next phase of experimentation. Collab-
orations began to take form that extended beyond Montreal. A second
event bringing the energies back to Montreal was planned for 2007. Hous-
ing the Body, Dressing the Environment organized itself around a different,
but closely related, question from that of the first event. The refrain for
this event was a phrase borrowed from the architects/conceptual art-
ists Arakawa and Madeline Gins: “What emanates from the body and
propositions
101
what emanates from the architectural surround intermixes” (2002, 61).

The area of exploration was the way in which the potentials expressed
through embodied movement—and in their “return as the movement
of thought”—exfoliate spaces of relation that settle into architectural
form. Body and built surround were treated as phase-shifts of the same pro-
cess: forms of life taking architectural form, their movements and poten-
tials returning like an echo of the architectural surround to co-causal effect.
For this event, generative feedback between movement on the one hand,
and architecture and interactive spatial design on the other, played the role
of the central organizing node that the interplay between corporeal and
incorporeal or abstract movements had fulfilled for Dancing the Virtual.
The general approach and major orientations of Dancing the Virtual
flowed over into Housing the Body. Many of the techniques of relation were
reprised. The model of hospitality was fed forward in the form of an invi-
tation to all the participants of Dancing the Virtual to return for Housing the
Body. With the exception of two, everyone returned, which condensed our
capacity to welcome new participants to ten, for a total of fifty.26 As with
the earlier event, a reading list was sent to the participants for online dis-
cussion in advance of the date to provide a pivot for concept-work and its
integrative alternation with embodied and hands-on work, toward a col-
lective practice of structured improvisation.
The techniques of relation mobilized for Dancing the Virtual had orga-
nized themselves around liminal activities forming event-transitions. For
Housing the Body, a mechanism was sought to bring the liminality of these
techniques—their minor, affective, tendential tenor—more concertedly
into the central activities. A new genre of technique of relation was envi-
sioned for this purpose: “platforms for relation.”
A platform for relation is a setup, system, or set of procedures that is
already tendentially operative, but rather than affording a specific func-
tion at first approach, is more suggestive of it. A platform for relation does
work, it embodies a certain technicity, but it is designed in such a way that
the limits and parameters of its potential functioning are not readily appar-
ent. This strategic incompleteness makes platforms for relation function
first and foremost as attractors offering openings for inventive interaction.
Platforms for relation are not technical forms standing as end products of
a design or creative process. They are germination beds for a process rebe-
ginning. The platforms for relation were envisioned to jump-start existing
102
collaborations and generate new projects, to gather the event’s unrolling

around the incipience of technicities to come. The invention of platforms
for relation was the enabling constraint for Housing the Body, Dressing the
Environment.
The call for participation generated the first set of platforms, as each
participant was invited to propose one. Then the core event-organizing
group parsed the platforms into categories and reproposed them as collec-
tive platforms to the participants in a bid to limit the number of platforms
to six. The platforms were then recomposed through affinity in the months
previous to the event by subgroups working independently through the
SenseLab’s online grouphub. On the public setting of a “writeboard,”
the platforms were intricately planned, sometimes co-germinating across
one another. All groups were encouraged to begin to collectively plan how
their platform could become a three-day workshop for the event. Within a
few months, participants had settled into their platforms and altered them
to suit their needs and desires. What the participants did not know yet was
that we would ask them to give their platform away after the first work-
shop, thus creating a contagion between processes. We fully expected some
platforms to resist the violence of this decree and that some would fall apart
for lack of participants. The idea was to create a process within a process
that would allow unforeseen interventions and regroupings to unfold. For
Housing the Body, the generative transitions would be between platforms
as well as between small-group and large-group activity.
The “Sound Surround” platform was one that resisted regrouping and
ended up twice as large (and twice as loud!). They proposed an invented
instrument: a microphone embedded in ice.27 Various sounds of unusual
quality could be made by percussing, caressing, or shaving the ice. The
sounds of the melting ice dripping into a metal tray below were captured by
another microphone. Both sound feeds were input into a computer, where
they could be digitally mixed and altered. The challenge of the group pro-
posing the platform was to explore the sonic potentials of this setup, what
manner of sound instrument it might lend itself to becoming, and what it
might offer as an instrument to the unfolding of the event. On the first
day, percussion was the favored approach. The result was cacophony—and
seriously percussed nerves all around.
By the third day, the approach had morphed. Microphones were set up
throughout the space to add a continuous feed of ambient sound into the
mix. The sound mix was then broadcast back into the room, forming a
propositions
103
central-instrument / ambient sound feedback loop. The volume was kept

to low levels. The result was to create a self-modulating ambient sound
envelope that contributed greatly to the affective tonality of the event.
The platform for relation had successfully given place to an inventive,
relational emergence.
Proposition 8
Embrace Failure
Throughout Housing the Body, Dressing the Environment, as was the case in
Dancing the Virtual, we were (sometimes painfully) aware that all explo-
rations at the edge of inquiry risk failure. Certain platforms for relation
didn’t take off, or even collapsed, their attractive force failing to find the
conditions for relational emergence in the given context. When that hap-
pened, either they dissipated entirely or elements of the platform com-
bined with another. “Failure,” processually speaking, added a fissional and
fusional dimension to the event that was not preplanned. From this point
of view, failure was generative, a positive formative factor in the event’s self-
organizing. A case in point was a regrouping that occurred on the last day of
the “Around Architecture” platform that took a turn toward the outside
of the event.28 The group improvised procedures to collectively explore
the juncture between architecture and urbanism, in this case the SAT build-
ing and its surrounding neighborhood.
Failures, for the SenseLab, have come to be thought of as opportunities
for the emergence of new techniques of experimentation: they push the
collective toward an engagement with the limit of what can be thought/
created in a particular context. Techniques of relation access their creative
potential most when they operate at the edge of what they are preconceived
to do. For this to happen, they must embrace the eventuality of their own
failure as a creative factor in their process.
Proposition 9
Practice Letting Go
“Giving away” the platforms for relation was meant to set a relay in motion
so that the potentials embodied in the initial enactment of the platform
might drift and evolve into new and unforeseen collaborative activities.
We hoped that the creation of new interplatform initiatives might result.
104
Letting go was one of the event’s central enabling constraints. It would plan
into the event the same kind of fissional-fusional evolution that failures
facilitate on an unplanned basis. The injunction to let go was dropped on
participants without warning. It came as something of a shock to the sys-
tem and elicited a certain resistance.
The resistance itself proved productive because it required a collective
working-out of the force of the injunction. In terms of its processual effect
as well as in terms of the justifiability, relative to the event’s self-organizing,
of imposing enabling constraints through a decisional act by a subset of
those involved. This brought out issues related to the positivity of osten-
sibly “negative” constraints, and to the complex interplay of degrees of
creative “freedom” and power of decision. It has always been a premise
of the SenseLab that a purely consensual process deadens potential and
that irruptions of decision are necessary for the vitality of a creative pro-
cess. The innovation we meant to convey was the yoking of “decision” to
“letting go,” practiced as an enabling constraint and a technique of relation,
so that even in the case of an arbitrarily imposed decision, power would
facilitate “power-to” and not “power-over.” Yoked to letting go, under the
proper conditions of an ethics of engagement, arbitrary decision can oper-
ate as a condition of spontaneity that actually activates greater degrees of
collective freedom.
This somewhat brutal intervention on behalf of letting go was under-
taken to focus on the notion that to be a success in its own terms the
kind of process the SenseLab was experimenting with would have to be
essentially disseminatory. The projects were not about ownership, either
of products or of the process itself. They were not about credit; they were
about creativity. Ultimately, they were about processual contagion: how
self-organizing techniques and intensities of collaborative experimentation
can self-propagate. We hoped that participants would come to view their
contributions as gifts to creative contagion.
The concepts of dissemination and the gift would return as central
refrains in the next two events. Together, they evoke the potential for
a different economy: a nonneoliberal alter-economy of creative relation
responding to the larger contextual issues set forth in the first two events.
propositions
105
third iteration
Proposition 10
Disseminate Seeds of Process
By the end of Housing the Body, Dressing the Environment, it was already clear
that we needed to come up with a different model for collective grouping.
Otherwise we were not going to be able to welcome any new people: the
interactive format of the events had reached its practical limit in terms
of the number of participants. There was also the problem of the epi-
sodic, exceptional nature of the events. This had initially been a strength.
The first two events extracted participants from their embeddedness in the
everyday of their local contexts, creating a vista for acting and thinking
otherwise. Now, however, this strength of the events began to feel like a
limitation in some ways, as participants returned to their home environ-
ments without necessarily being able to find ways of following up on the
momentum they might have found through the event. Collaborations did
spin off in a number of cases. But as long as the problem of how to propa-
gate the techniques of research-creative relation that had been collectively
invented through the events was not addressed, the collaborations were
left exposed in contexts sometimes hostile to their carrying-forward.29 The
limitative political-economic, intellectual, and institutional constraints that
produced the need to seek engagement elsewhere in the first place threat-
ened to clamp back down as soon as participants returned to their home
turf. Added to that was the issue of travel costs to Montreal, both in terms of
its stress on personal finances and on the environment. It was clearly time
to experiment further. How could the collectively produced techniques
for transformative ethics of engagement be disseminated outward, into
participants’ respective home environments, in ways singularly self-adapted
to each habitat? How could the process we were collectively creating also
open itself to nonacademics or nonprofessionals who did not have access
to travel funding? How could this dissemination be effectively spread to
groups that had not been involved in prior SenseLab events?
Starting from discussions with Australian SenseLab members Andrew
Murphie30 and Lone Bertelsen, the beginning of a new distributive mech-
anism was proposed that would seek to spark locally rooted collabora-
tive intensities across the globe. The goal of our third event, Society of
Molecules, was to find mechanisms and techniques that would allow
10 6
us to mutually interact and influence one another, without the need for
face-to-face encounter. The SenseLab would go remote. The problem was
how to distribute self-organizing creative energies carrying potentially
transformative force, while operatively interconnecting them at a distance:
research-creation as action at a distance. Moving in that direction was a
necessary part of one of the SenseLab’s larger goals: to contribute to a con-
tinuing collective culture dedicated to an ethics of engagement, operating
on a larger scale and conveying a power of contagion.
In the year leading up to Society of Molecules,31 a number of enabling con-
straints were collectively brainstormed. Building on our planning conver-
sations with the folks in Sydney, Australia, we knew that the global event
would consist of correlated local events. Each local event would creatively
address a “politico-aesthetic” issue felt by local participants to affect the
quality of their lives. The “politico-” element referred to formative or orga-
nizational forces that were active in each local environment, but extended
beyond it in a way that placed them in connection with other locales.
Examples might be: forces of redevelopment or economic stimulus that
palpably changed the culture of the city; forces propelling or responding
to the movement of people across borders; environmental issues as they
play out locally; issues of urban planning and the conviviality of public
spaces; and the potential local derelict spaces offer for alternative cultural
initiatives adapting strategies from other emplacements or linking into ear-
lier political movements for local empowerment. Our proposition was that
these larger forces be addressed from the specific angle of their local effect,
but in cognizance of their wider significance and with an active attempt
to bring their translocal dimension differently into play.
The “aesthetic” element referred to the need to respond creatively
to these forces: positively and generatively. Finally, the local groupings,
known as “molecules” (a reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the
“minor” as “molecular” versus “molar”) would comprise between three and
ten individuals. Their politico-aesthetic interventions would last between
three hours and seven days and take place during the first week of May
2009. It was also vital to us that the ban against “reporting” and the encour-
agement of affectively oriented performative mechanisms for making con-
nective transitions would apply to relations between molecules.
No constraint of any kind was placed on the content of the interven-
tions, in keeping with the earlier events’ problematization of the danger of
content-based distinctions for a generative process. Neither was there any
propositions
107
constraint on the form the interventions would take. Form and content
would be entirely determined locally but remain open to the contagious
influence of other local groupings.
The problem of performatively activating links rather than relying on
reportage was exacerbated by the distributed nature of the event. Tech-
niques of relation would have to be invented to connect molecules across
cities and countries and even continents. Two approaches used in previ-
ous events were adapted to this purpose. The model of hospitality was
hybridized to become one of diplomacy.32 This became the technique of
the “emissary.”
Each molecule was invited to choose an emissary as well as to name
a host. The emissary of each local grouping was paired with the host of
another group. Sometime in the five months preceding the main event,
the emissary would travel to the host group (virtual voyages were a possi-
bility where resources did not allow physical travel). The time and mode
of their arrival would be unannounced: the arrival of the guest had an ele-
ment of the unexpected. The role of the emissary was to make “first con-
tact” with the other local culture. To facilitate the meeting, “movement
profiles” were compiled by the SenseLab and distributed to the emissar-
ies. The movement profiles described the designated host’s habitual daily
movements through the city so that if the emissary so desired, first contact
could be made in a performative fashion, taking advantage of the element
of surprise.33 Emissaries were encouraged to use physical address infor-
mation and standard forms of communication like cell phones sparsely,
focusing instead on “encountering” the host, guided by the profile. Upon
meeting, the host’s job was to gather the local molecule together and treat
the emissary to a “relational soup.”
The relational soup could be anything at all. The enabling constraint
was that whatever form it took, it should give the emissary an experience
of the host group—a taste of that group’s process, modalities of interac-
tion and organizing, affective tonality, and concerns. Sharing an actual
meal was a simple default option. Whatever the relational soup proved to
be, the emissary would return home with a “recipe” for it. The recipe was
something that packaged the relational-soup activity into a technique of
relation that could serve as a formula to be adapted for use by the home
group upon the emissary’s return if the technique of relation it encapsu-
lated resonated with that group’s own process. The recipe was one of the
ways letting go was integrated into the interaction, now tweaked toward a
10 8
practice of the gift. The host group’s gift of a processual recipe was recipro-
cated in the form of a “process seed” brought by the emissary and left with
the host group. The seed was sealed and was to be opened only after the
event. It could be an object around which a group activity could be orga-
nized, or a set of procedures to be followed collectively. The simple default
option of this technique of relation was an actual plant seed that would
be cared for by the molecule in the period after the event.
The role of the recipe was to create conditions encouraging processual
contagion in the lead-up to the event. The role of the seed was to leave
a trace of that processual exchange that could be activated in the fol-
low-up to the event. The idea was to surround the period of the main dis-
tributed event with a longer-duration continuity of relation based on an
ethic of care.
The “care” involved was not a personal quality or a private subjective
state. It was a collective practice of care: an enactive, technique-based con-
cern on the part of each group for the process of another group and for the
overall process in which all the groups were implicated. Care was consid-
ered an impersonal technique for an ethics of engagement taking a directly
political (“diplomatic”) form. It was understood in terms of care for the
event (like the event’s hospitality) in which a collectivity was equally but
differentially implicated. Everyone was actively together in the event, in
each case from a different angle of approach expressing the singularity of
a local process networking with others. Collectively singular.
Proposition 11
Practice Care and Generosity Impersonally,
as Event-Based Political Virtues
This notion of differential embeddedness in the unfolding of a collective,

distributed event was explicitly a rejection of the notion of the “common.”
Care organized itself not around the common but around the irreducibly
singular. It concerned being-different-together and becoming-together as
an expression of those differences, as part of a shared process participated
in differentially. Care, as care for the event, assumes no commons, in
the sense of an equality of access to a preexisting, valorizable resource. It
assumes no commonality or ethos of consensus, in the sense of general
characteristics or convictions adhered to by all. And it assumes no com-
munity, in the sense of a defining identity that precedes and determines a
propositions
Inflexions: A Journal for Research Creation, issue 3.
Designed by Leslie Plumb.
110
collectivity’s coming-together and sets a priori boundaries to that conver-

gence. All it assumes is the eventful integration of group differentials, in
and for the singularity of an event, for only as long as the event sustains
its own self-organizing process.
Proposition 12
If an Organization Ceases to Be a Conduit for Singular
Events of Collective Becoming, Let It Die
In the end, seventeen molecules in fifteen cities around the world partici-
pated in Society of Molecules. Molecular interventions were of many types.
As had been the case with the platforms for relation of Housing the Body,
some of the interventions were specifically conceived for Society of Mole-
cules, while other groups used already-initiated projects as focal points for
integrating into the Society of Molecules networking process.
To give just a few examples of a molecular intervention, the San Diego–
Tijuana molecule addressed immigration issues around the U.S.–Mexican
border. They hijacked a public telephone booth on the Mexican side and
converted it into a free phone by patching the connection into Skype.
Mexicans who were deported from the United States or encountered diffi-
culty entering were invited to use the phone to notify friends and family
or to call for help.34 The Amsterdam group addressed issues of ecology and
food practices. They foraged for edibles growing in the city and prepared a
collective meal from what they found in the urban environment. One of
the Montreal groups spent time observing the life of derelict spaces in the
city slated for redevelopment: who used them, how they used them, what
patterns of movement grew up around them, and how they were policed.
They joined in the patterns of movement and tried to organize participa-
tory encounters that gave a gift of conviviality to the ephemeral commu-
nity they found. Among these was a “Lack of Information Booth” that
invited the public to explore the missing links between the official view
of the city and its redevelopment and the ground-level forms of life fill-
ing the pores in the urban fabric. The Ottawa–Gatineau molecule perfor-
matively, and ironically, addressed feminist issues. They celebrated the
vagina dentata.
In the hope of building on the energies of the event, a special issue
of the SenseLab journal Inflexions was prepared in the event’s aftermath
that sought to continue the networking by further developing concepts
propositions
111
activated through the event, and to showcase the inventiveness of the

local actions.35
This third iteration of the Technologies of Lived Abstraction event series
left a strong collective sense, at least at the SenseLab in Montreal, that it
was indeed possible to invent techniques for generating aesthetico-political
events across a distributive network with very little central input (beyond
the setting in place of a skeletal framework of enabling constraints offering
affordances for cross-fertilization). Recognizing the large number of collec-
tives of similar inspiration working around the world under such rallying
cries as “artivism,” “hacktivism,” “urban art intervention,” and “culture
jamming,” there was a sense of participating, in one small way, in a larger
process with unbounded potential for further networking and contagion.
Society of Molecules also revived the dream of creating a “Process Seed Bank”
that might provide the growing culture of this widely distributed ethics of
engagement with a repository for sharing “recipes” for the diverse tech-
niques of relation that have been put into practice across the world in dif-
ferent collective contexts. The SenseLab stakes no claim to originality with
respect to these approaches and inventive practices. Its only claim is to par-
ticipation in experimentation.
Generating the Impossible

The final event in the series, like the first, relates to a challenge coming to
the SenseLab from outside. Monique Savoie, founding director of the SAT,
said she had been thinking about what an “exploded gallery” (galerie éclatée)
might mean and how it might be invented. Her question came out of the
SAT’s experience of constructing a gallery space for new media art on its
ground floor. The gallery project had been unsatisfying, and was discon-
tinued after a year. Savoie attributed the failure to the unsuitability of the
traditional white-cube gallery model to new-media-based interactive arts,
and to the traditions of ephemeral, performance-based art practices from
earlier periods with which they are often in resonance. She envisioned a
gallery that burst beyond the limits of the traditional model. What would
a “gallery” be like that didn’t confine itself to formally delimited exhibition
spaces but leaked out into the corridors and closets, through the admin-
istrative offices, onto the roof and across the building’s façade, saturating
an entire architectural field? How could such a “gallery” extend its field
even further, onto the sidewalk in front, to the mosque behind, through
the inner-city park next door, toward Chinatown down the street, sending
11 2
tendrils into the city surrounds? How could the reinvention of the SAT as
an exploded gallery extend or intensify what research-creation can do, and
how might that experimentation infiltrate, on its own exploding terms, the
neoliberal project of the Quartier des Spectacles? Savoie gently suggested
that helping answer these questions might be a project the SenseLab would
be interested in taking on.
The seed for Generating the Impossible was planted. This final event of
the series would take place in July 2011, during the rollout of a new phase
of the SAT’s existence marked by the opening of a complete building ren-
ovation, including the addition of a third story topped by a large-scale
interactive, immersive media environment in the shape of a dome (the
“SATosphere”). The SAT planned to use the architectural rebuilding as an
occasion for renewing its experimentation as an art institution, including
a rethinking of the modalities of exhibition and kinds of creative events
such an institution affords. (Please refer to the final chapter, “Postscript
to Generating the Impossible,” for a brief account of how the event actu-
ally transpired. This chapter, under its original title, “Propositions for an
Exploded Gallery: Generating the Impossible,” was originally written to
share with other collectives as a contribution toward what we imagined
might become a “process seed bank.” Once it began to take monstrous form
[we had originally anticipated writing a short five-page piece!], we realized
that extending our practice into a written document on techniques that
have emerged over the past ten years would also allow us to take stock of
where we had come to as a group and to collectively reorient toward the
next event. Accordingly, it was written in the future tense. We have retained
the original wording here.)
To ensure that this contribution also adds to the ongoing self-reinvention
of the SenseLab, the approach the SenseLab has developed up to now will
be turned on its head, in keeping with our exhortation to practice letting
go. For each of our previous events, participants were asked to bring only
their techniques and to leave their products behind, so that the meeting
would occur at the level of the work’s technicity and its intensive capac-
ity to propagate and vary. The space of encounter was always carefully
conditioned and enabling constraints set in place. This time, on the con-
trary, we will ask people to come with all the products—papers, artworks,
thoughts, ideas—that it pleases them to bring, as well as their techniques.
As a further challenge, this cacophony will not be organized in advance:
except renting a campground in the forest for all participants for five days
propositions
113
(July 3–7, 2011) and directing our work toward the space of the SAT for the
following three days (July 8–10, 2011), nothing will be done in advance to
prepare the space of experimentation. One key enabling constraint will
be the very injunction to begin the event under conditions of chaos, then
move the event through a process of self-organization toward an “emer-
gent attunement.”36
metamodeling variation
The challenge of “exploding” the gallery brings the SenseLab back to the
specific context from which its explorations began: a questioning of
the dominant genres of art-institutional practice; the problem of how
dichotomies like those between pure research and applied research, and
between creative practice and theoretical inquiry, can be challenged
and then recomposed into a research-creation continuum.
Proposition 13
Brace for Chaos
Standard forms for the sharing of work—conference, artist’s talk, demo,

exhibition, festival—operate according to generic templates. Each genre
assumes a certain spatial disposition, time parameters, rhythms of transi-
tion, and modalities of interaction. The generic template is not unvary-
ing, but sets recognizable limits to acceptable variation. Embedded in
the genre is a certain understanding of how a work comes to experience.
This includes what Jacques Rancière calls a “distribution of the sensible”
(2005). Particular combinations of sense modes tend to be privileged
above others, typically with one dominant sense foregrounded. The dom-
inant sensory mode, combined with spatial, temporal, and transitional
formattings, creates an economy of attention and emphasis that amounts
to a value system. Implicit and explicit value judgments are thus primed
into the event. Certain moments, and certain contributing factors, gain
stature over others. The same is true of the people involved. The various
distributive operations of the genre function primarily to assign differen-
tially weighted roles to those involved (from the invisibility of building
and technical staff to the overexposure of the star artist or academic to the
backgrounded centrality of the audience’s watching—to limit the exam-
ples to the visual).
The enabling constraint of creative chaos is meant to disable these
No Tit le Ye t
114
limitative constraints of generic formatting. The work of the event will

be to confront the question of how a research-creation event can come to
distribute the sensible differently, starting from the most minimal format-
ting. If one participant comes with a philosophical discourse to present
and another with a cacophonous interactive sound installation, how can
these two activities cohabit the same event? What kind of economies of
exchange and reciprocity can make this possible? The activities brought
to the event may well embody existing genres, but the space-time param-
eters into which they enter together will be unformatted, and the value
weightings and distribution of roles indeterminate. Exploding a gallery will
depend on how interference can be transformed into resonance. How does
an event create an emergent attunement? Can a collective event–caring
symbiosis emerge? If so, how can the public be brought into the process at a
certain phase of the event’s unfolding in a role other than that of audience
or spectator: as an active, co-causal factor in the event? Given the chaotic
conditions, the task seems nothing if not impossible.
Proposition 14
Render Formative Forces
It is only out of chaos that the impossible can come. But as William James
notes, there is no such thing as pure chaos. There is quasi-chaos: a field of
divergences and convergences, comings-together and goings-apart, con-
catenation and separation, already tending to sort itself out in the deter-
mination of a thisness (James 1996, 65). Chaos, in and of itself, can never
be experienced. What is experienced is the commotion of determinations-
to-come vying for expression in an overfull field of potential relations.
This quasi-chaos pulsates with potential technicities—as-yet-unstructured
improvisations. This is why initial conditions of chaos can be an enabling
constraint, and not just a disabling of existing genres. The vagueness of the
event’s initial conditions enables it to come actively into itself, emergently
modulating its dynamic form as it passes through the phases of its own
occurrence. The event-in-the-making’s self-modulation in-forms an occur-
rent individuation. The event draws itself out into a line of formation that
folds in and through its welling expression, describing the abstract shape
of the event it will have been. From chaos emerges what Paul Klee calls the
“pure and simple line” of an event of expression’s dynamic unfolding. Cre-
ative chaos is the self-drawing of a pure and simple abstract line, running
propositions
115
from the commotional fullness of an impossible “what if” to the “here

now” of an event risking its own singular individuation.
“Render visible,” Klee said; do “not render or reproduce the visible”
(quoted in Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 342). What is rendered visible in
painted forms, for Klee, are the generative forces in-forming the aesthetic
event. For Generating the Impossible, we propose to activate the genera-
tive forces of a form of research-creation encounter—not so much render
them visible as multimodally palpable, in an unforeseen unfolding com-
position of sense modes, spaces, roles, and rhythms of transition entering
into unaccustomed resonance. Generating the Impossible’s proposition is to
render palpable the force of the event’s self-articulating expression. This is
a radical empirical proposition, in James’s sense of the term: the singular
relational force of a welling event, as James emphasizes, is as real as any of
the generic forms or finished contents that may enter into it as building
blocks or come out of it as products.
An event’s relational force cannot be reproduced. It remains, always, a
singular movement. It has a velocity, uniquely played out from the initial
conditions at hand. It is potentializing, and renders potential. It follows
the arc of a tendency working itself out.
Generating the Impossible proposes to intervene directly at the level of
generative tendencies, in such a way as to render them palpably retriev-
able for new research-creation events. Tendencies are as singular as an
event’s generative force, their “pure and simple line” resolutely connected
to their eventful coming-to-expression in a specific time and place. They
can be iteratively reactivated, to variable effect. We are not proposing to
model what research-creation events can be. Instead, through the technic-
ity of singular tendings, we are collectively, eventfully, setting into motion
a metamodeling of emergence.
For Félix Guattari, to metamodel is to render palpable lines of forma-
tion, starting from no one model in particular, actively taking into account
the plurality of models vying for fulfillment. Metamodeling takes forces
of formation actively into account from the angle of their variations to
come.37 The modeling is “meta-” because the lines it draws are “abstract.”
They are abstract in the sense that the formative tendencies they map are
eventfully more-than present, returning across iterations, in continuing
variation. Events are both here-now, actual in their occasions, and always
in excess of their present iterations. Metamodeling seeks to map their refor-
mative excess.
116
A tendency, metamodeled, is an incipient assemblage (a platform for

relation).38 The question of an assemblage emerging into occurrent attune-
ment is, as always, a question of technique, as both Deleuze and Guattari
and Whitehead emphasize. “The right chaos, and the right vagueness, are
jointly required for any effective harmony” (Whitehead 1978, 112). For
Generating the Impossible, the quasi-chaotic initial conditions for emer-
gence include not only the specific contents brought by participants, and
not only the plurality of generic forms in which they might be exhibited.
They also include the accumulated techniques of relation experimentally
assembled in past events. For Generating the Impossible, the presence of
past participants will prepopulate the event’s emergence with collectively
acquired tendencies vying for the opportunity to metamodel themselves
in a new iteration under very different conditions than in earlier events.
The gesture of beginning this iteration from quasi-chaos with a min-
imum of conditioning extends the metamodeling of generative collabo-
rative practices to fields of activity where the number and nature of the
variables potentially entering into play are greater and even more unpre-
dictable. It’s time to let them loose on the world at large.
Proposition 15
Creatively Return to Chaos
The first phase of Generating the Impossible will take place in a forest camp
north of Montreal. Participants will gather for five days of reading and hik-
ing, playing and brainstorming, strategizing and swimming, provisioned
if possible with a dynamic digital model of the renovated SAT building. In
this low-tech forest environment, inventive means will be sought to acti-
vate new media work. There will be little time to read every paper, to think
every thought people will have brought: this will be the quasi-chaos of our
challenge. But we will come armed with concepts derived from a list of
readings we will all read in the previous ten months.
In the second phase, the group will descend upon the SAT in Mon-
treal for the setup and activation of the exploded gallery. The occupation
of the SAT will last three days. At a certain point, when the sought-after
emergent attunement among the disparate activities co-habiting the event-
space has emerged, the event will be opened to the public, who will be
invited to actively participate. Defining what constitutes an attunement,
and what modality of public participation will be enabled, will be the
propositions
11 7
main challenges of the participants’ self-organizing over the two phases

of the event.
Metamodelings of generative process are deterritorializing. They move
tendentially across institutionalizations and morph them. If the metamod-
eling is to avoid becoming a model—a prescriptive template—Generating the
Impossible will have to embrace its own perishing, attuned not to dissolv-
ing content but to the reactivatable traces of the experiment’s tendential
passing. An event of metamodeling must be self-expiring. It must creatively
find ways to affirm its generative power in its passing. The emergent attune-
ment cannot be allowed to settle into a simple harmony, where “harmony”
is understood as a diversity of parts subordinated to a unified functioning.
We propose an event that is not self-institutionalizing. For these reasons, a
mechanism for the perishing of Generating the Impossible will be built into
it as an enabling constraint. The technique of relation embodying this
enabling constraint is called the “free radical.”
In physiology, a free radical is an unbonded oxygen molecule loose in
the body. Free radicals are a natural by-product of the body’s life-sustaining
metabolism. But due to their high reactivity, they may also interfere with
the body’s regulated functioning by destroying the bonds between mole-
cules, releasing still more free radicals. Free radicals possess a “bond disso-
ciation energy”: a contagious power of destruction immanent to the very
process that ensures organic functioning. The role of the free radical for
Generating the Impossible will be to break down the emergent attunement
after it has just emerged, but before it can stabilize into a self-sustaining
harmony that might assert itself as a model. The free radical is envisioned as
a kind of trickster figure that will intervene at the penultimate stage of the
event’s emergence, preempting too-unified an organ-ization. The free rad-
ical will infiltrate the event-space with a joyfully affirmative bond dissocia-
tion energy. As the contagion spreads, the event will return to the creative
quasi-chaos from which it came, leaving only the ripples of its passing.39
Proposition 16
Play Polyrhythms of Relation
The notion of “emergent attunement” as we propose to practice it is

adapted from the work of Daniel Stern (1985, 138–45). Relational attune-
ment as Stern conceives it is more a polyrhythm than a harmony. In a
harmonic musical chord, the singularity of the notes is subsumed into the
118
global effect of their coming-together. Their diversity disappears into

the unity of that effect, and into its structural function in the larger organi-
zation of the piece. An attunement in Stern’s sense does not subsume the
singularity of the contributing actions that come into relation, even as it
brings them together to joint effect.
Take an animated conversation. Words move between participants,
accompanied by gestures. These gestures, while tuned to the words,
perform a kind of alternate rhythm, opening the conversation to its
prearticulation—the ways in which it moves beyond the said into the reg-
ister of the felt but unsaid. As the gestures begin to affect how the conver-
sation evolves, they begin to play off each other, in a rhythm of alternation
and overlay, creating complex patterns of resonant emphasis and contra-
puntal divergence. But this does not happen through imitation or mim-
icry. The gestures do not repeat the simultaneous flow of words, nor do
they resemble or match them. They accompany them, on their own level,
in a manner all their own.
The improvised composition of co-gesturing enters into a pattern vis-
à-vis the flow of words. An even more complex emergence of resonant
emphasis and contrapuntal divergence arises between the gestures and
the words. Together, they make felt a speaking-with that moves the con-
versation. The words on either side of the conversation co-speak, just as
the hands, face, arms, and torso co-gesture. They play off each other, in
alternation, sharing the heat of the moment. They overlay and cross,
attuning both parties to the conversation’s continually passing present.
Even moments of confusion or discord are attunements, in that they
intensely re-cue the participants to what is happening. The play of words
has its own improvised rhythm that is neither separable from the accom-
panying rhythm of the gestures nor reducible to it. Double articulation:
words and gestures differently coming together. This doubly articulated
flow is punctuated by felt prearticulations of an interruptive kind: begin-
nings of interjections cut off in the name of politeness, audibly perfor-
mative but meaningless grunts and squeaks. The bodily gestures are most
intense at precisely those moments. A backgrounding, foregrounding dance
of prearticulation, moving between gesture and words, makes the force
of the conversation felt beyond its semantic formulation.40 The conver-
sation is less a back-and-forth between two separate bodies than a single
relational flow occurring in complex relation. Words and gesture, tone
and rhythm, fold generatively back into one another, returning to the
propositions
119
quasi-chaos of tending-toward-meaning from which this conversation—

and all language— comes. The overall effect is a coming- differently-
together-again-into-language in a shared event of speech that was integrally
co-composed.
Each party to the conversation will have thought and felt differently.
Each will continue afterward to feel, again very differently, the tendential
force of the prearticulations that came to the “tip of the tongue” but then
were swallowed back down by the churning momentum of the event.
What was said-gestured, and gestured-unsaid, will modulate the ongoing
relation. It will have implanted or inflected tendencies. Accordingly, it will
have a co-causal influence on the forms and contents of the participants’
future intercourse together—and even perhaps apart. How many times do
we “rehearse” or “rehash” with one person a conversation we had with
another? How many times has a prearticulated tuning toward language (a
not-yet of words) popped up later as a fully fledged comment we are cer-
tain would have clinched the argument, causing an obsessive replay of the
conversation in our heads? Each subsequent conversation will relationally
fold the thisness of conversing into its open field of emergence. A conver-
sation never stands on its own, separate from its capacity to rejig the field
of attunement. It has already spread like ripples on a fluid social surface.
When all is said and done, the conversation will have had a different
lived quality for each participant. But it will still have been strictly the
same speech event. This is attunement: a polyrhythmic coming-differently-
together through the same event, carrying the event’s field of emergence
through its unfolding, in such a way that its having happened becomes
a co-condition for what follows—without in any way modeling it. Each
new conversation will have to start all over again, under altered initial
conditions, from the field of emergence of language. Each subsequent
conversation will carry the field of emergence through itself in its own
reimprovised way, to new polyrhythmic effect, expressing a lived quality
singularly its own. Each conversation will happen not in the individual
bodies of the participants, but in the relational unfoldings of its actual and
potential expressions.
For Generating the Impossible, we emphasize “emergent” attunement to
underline the impersonal aspect of attunement: the field of (to return to
the same example) conversational relation as a self-extending, indefinite
social “surface.” We conceive of research-creation similarly: as an indefi-
nite “surface” of relation rippled by previous SenseLab events. The field of
1 20
conversation includes an infinity of factors, other than language narrowly

defined. Its cresting in language makes it a speech event, and yet it carries
in germ an infinity of other incipient event species.
However the field of relational co-composition crests—be it in language,
through art, in movement, in politics—it will do so in an emergent attun-
ing. In Generating the Impossible, we hope to make that attunement take
central stage toward the register of the politico-aesthetic event. Whatever
the register, what counts is the activation of a heterogeneous field of poly-
rhythmic expressibility toward a next determinate event of expression.
What is being attuned, in the final analysis, is not only the individuals
involved, to each other. More fundamentally, it is the quasi-chaos of the
initial conditions that is attuning itself to the singularity of the coming
event of co-composition. What transpires cannot be credited to the individ-
uals as such. The event credits itself with their coming-differently-together.
Proposition 17
Explore New Economies of Relation
Forms of Life
There is a well-worn term for the relational machinery that moves a field of
emergence through its serial expressions, specifically in a way that feeds the
outcomes of each self-registering event onto a surface of recording where
their comparative value can be assessed in some way. It is economy. In a
formal economy, the valuation is quantitative and is derived using con-
ventional measures. The formal valuation then feeds back into the field of
emergence, to become an enabling constraint that conditions next expres-
sions. Each expression generates an assessable yield, and the yields mutually
reinforce (or weaken) each other. The mutual reinforcement or weakening
across iterations can itself be quantified, in statistical indexes assessing the
“health” of the process.
There are also informal economies. These revolve around assessments
of value that are directly qualitative in nature, and therefore vaguer and
less easily indexed. One form of this kind of valuation is prestige-value. A
formal economy also generates its own prestige-value as a spin-off of its
quantitative valuations, or it captures prestige-value produced by informal
economies it taps into and annexes to itself. The most typical contempo-
rary form of prestige-value is star-value or celebrity-value.
propositions
1 21
For example, there is a formal economy of academic activity in which

value is assessed in terms of number of peer-reviewed research results. The
greater the countable research outcomes, the more able a researcher is to
continue to produce: his or her record can be used to justify better work-
ing conditions and access to research-project funding. Parallel to this, there
is an academic star system. It functions as an informal economy bestow-
ing intellectual prestige-value on select individuals. The formal and infor-
mal academic economies are most often mutually reinforcing. Both tie
into the monetary economy, in the form of increased earning power on
the academic job market. In the art arena, there is a similar conjunction
between a formal economy (based on the number of jury-assessed shows
and prizes and the number of solo versus group shows) and an art-world
star system informally distributing prestige-value. Traditionally, the tie-in of
the art world to the monetary economy is through the commodity market
for art objects. With research-creation and other ways of professionalizing
artistic activity in the university system, the tie-in extends to a hybrid art–
academic job market as well.
Monetary economy, of course, can mean only one thing: the capitalist
economy. The capitalist economy taps into all other formal and informal
economies in a continuously varied attempt to annex them to itself, which
is to say, to its particular forms of formal valuation and indexing. The cap-
italist economy is economically all-subsuming. It is universal.
The capitalist economy is not only a universal process of subsuming
all forms of value to monetary valuation. It also formally builds into its
definition of value an imperative to quantitative value-adding. Capital is,
by definition, money that grows more money. The capitalist economy
is formally dedicated to quantitative growth, over and above all other
values. Capitalist techniques of relation are, without exception, mecha-
nisms of accumulation.
All of this matters for the experimental practice of research-creation we
are advancing because the universal subsumption of all other economies,
formal and informal, under the capitalist economy amounts to a capture
of every species of event—including their respective fields of emergent
expressibility, the heterogeneity of their co-composing polyrhythms, their
improvisational power to repeat singularly with variation, their tendential
arcs, their cresting expression on social surfaces of recording that constitute
evolving genres of co-activity (like that of conversation, but also an infin-
ity of others). When the capitalist economy subsumes all other economies,
1 22
it is not just capturing monetary value. It is capturing processes of indi-

viduation. It is capturing entire fields of emergent relation. It is capturing
powers of becoming. Capitalism endeavors nothing less than the universal
capture of forms of life. It subsumes them, sometimes gently, more often
brutally, to techniques of relation dedicated to quantitative value-adding
and accumulation.
It is important not to mistake this capture for a homogenization. The
forms of life captured by the capitalist process produce value by distin-
guishing themselves from each other. Capitalism is as singularizing as it is
subsuming.41 The issue is that the singularization is subject to competition
in a way that foregrounds quantitative measures of success over the rich-
ness of qualitative diversity. The heterogeneity of forms of life is important
only to the extent that those forms add capital value. Although the cap-
italist process creates the conditions for the singular emergence of forms
of life and feeds off their heterogeneity, it ultimately attributes no value
to them as such. It is supremely indifferent to the qualitative richness that
animates its field.
Recent currents in Marxist-inspired thought analyze the phenomenon
of singularization and heterogenesis animating the contemporary capital-
ist process in terms of “immaterial labor.” The idea is that in a “knowledge
economy,” forms of creative cooperation are invented to feed the new
informational market. These collaborative processes compose new forms
of relational life. Given that they are processes of cooperation, they have
a potential for self-organization. Under certain circumstances, they might
succeed in decoupling from the dominant system of valuation to affirm
the value of their self-propagating events in their own terms. Movements
like open source, peer-to-peer sharing, and tools for collective web-based
authorship are seen as harbingers of this, particularly to the degree to which
they become self-affirming “ways of life.” When this happens, they poten-
tially co-compose the beginnings of an alter-economy. This foretokens an
overcoming of capitalism from the inside out, in a playing out of one of
capitalism’s own immanent tendencies—that of creatively productive col-
laborative relation.
alter-economies
If capitalism is a universal process of capture, there is no simple way out. All
activities are at some point, in some way, taken up in it. But if capitalism is
propositions
1 23
also singularly inventive of new forms of relation, then despite this com-
plicity there are emergent forms of life always on the make that might come
to assert greater autonomy. The result can be leakage in the system—lines
of flight toward a noncapitalist future. Lines of flight are immanent cri-
tiques of capitalism in action.
The Technologies of Lived Abstraction event series was always destined
to co-compose with, and around, capitalist capture, to invent new lines
of flight or reinforce existing ones, for a lived glimpse of a noncapitalist
economy. This is why we started the present discussion with an evoca-
tion of the neoliberal economic context. The SenseLab’s Technologies of
Lived Abstraction event series was always under an immanent imperative
to return explicitly to the problem of economies. This was done from the
start by deemphasizing the product in favor of experimentation with col-
laborative creative process as a value in itself. Ultimately, the “impossibil-
ity” that is the aim of its culminating event is to contribute, in however
small and faltering a way, to metamodeling a noncapitalist alter-economy
of creative relation.
a lived economy of qualities of experience

The foregoing discussion enables us to specify some of the characteristics
of such an alter-economy. It is informal. It is unquantifiable. Its valuations
directly concern qualities of life. But the affirmation of qualities of experi-
ence refuses to settle around prestige-value. Its process is autonomous in
the sense that it is self-propagating. What propagates is an evolving form-
of-life that partners thought and creative/design practice at the emergent
level where they already come co-causally together. This is a polyrhythmic
economy of germinal forms attuning—of forces of life finding new collective
expression. Emergent life, lived less as value-adding than as a value in itself.
Ultimately, the value produced is the process: its very qualitative autonomy.
The polyrhythmic heterogeneity of the creative co-factors entering
this economy’s composition retain their individual resonant tenor as sub-
processes in their own right, even as they enter into dynamic relations of
attunement. They attune through the research-creation process, without
abdicating their power to also iterate autonomously and to self-affirm.
Research-creation as we propose to practice it is a polyrhythmic attuning
of mutually composing autonomous activities that collectively resist defin-
itive capitalist capture and affirm value in terms that cannot be quantified.
1 24
limit and threshold

All economies involve exchange. According to Deleuze and Guattari,
exchange is only apparently organized according to a principle of equiv-
alence that is applied punctually in each act of exchange between two
individuals: for example, an equivalence between a good of one kind and
another realized punctually in a trade. Exchange is not punctual. It has a
serial order that implicates a collectivity. The series of exchanges, Deleuze
and Guattari argue, is in fact organized as a function of a limit. The limit
is the “idea of the last objects received, or rather receivable, on each side”
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 437). “Last” here does not mean “the most
recent, nor the final, but rather the penultimate, the next to the last, the
last one before the apparent exchange loses its appeal for the exchangers,
or forces them to modify their respective assemblages, to enter another
assemblage” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 437). Appeal: the idea of the limit
is qualitative. The limit-idea of the next-to-the-last exchange after which
the series of exchanges would change intuitively informs each punctual act
of trade. Thus there is a qualitative evaluation that underlies each “equiv-
alence” produced by a trade and sustains the possibility of the series of
exchanges continuing as before. The appeal of sustaining the exchange
activity is essentially the desirability of sustaining the way of life associated
with the objects exchanged.
Deleuze and Guattari give the example of trading for axes in a tribal
society. If the penultimate is passed and the limit actually reached, there
will be a surplus of axes. When the surplus is absorbed, a transition will
necessarily occur to a new assemblage—a new form of warfare or a new
form of agricultural production. An entire way of life will be transformed.
The reaching of the limit is the passing of a qualitative threshold to a new
collective form of life featuring new kinds of activity. The punctual equiva-
lence realized in a given trade between individuals is a function of a qualita-
tive evaluation ultimately bearing on a collective form of life. The object of
the evaluation is less the thing exchanged than the relational field of activ-
ity into which the object is inserted. The qualitative evaluation of the limit
is the organizing principle of a field of relation that immanently informs
every punctual event belonging to the field, and sustains them all. What
is at stake is less the equivalence between the objects exchanged than the
sustenance of their relational field of exchangeability, within certain quali-
tative parameters. The limit idea is the economic expression of a collective
propositions
1 25
ideal: the desirability of a form of life. This is not a transcendent ideal. It

operates immanently to the events it concerns. Uncrossed, the limit is a
sustaining factor in the serial production of new iterations of events in the
same qualitative field. If it is crossed, it will have been a generative factor
in a “necessary rebeginning” (1987, 438). Either way, it is a creative factor.
According to Deleuze and Guattari, the principle that exchange is fun-
damentally “marginalist” (sustained by a qualitative evaluation relative to
a limit beyond which lies a necessary rebeginning) and that the operation
of the limit is bound up with surplus also organizes the capitalist market.42
Not only is capitalist exchange immanently organized along marginalist
lines, but within the field of capitalist exchange proliferate forms of life that
are not capitalist per se, but directly affirm a form of life and the experien-
tial qualities it harbors, in similarly marginalist terms. The active organi-
zation of a field of relation as a function of an immanent limit coinciding
with a threshold to a new rebeginning is a characteristic of all qualitative
economies (and of the qualitative dimension of economies oriented over-
all toward quantification).
Take Deleuze and Guattari’s example of the alcoholic. In the process
of drinking, each drink exchanged by the alcoholic for money is, to some
extent, the potential “last” drink. If the potential “lastness”—the limit-
idea—is not negotiated, the drinking process, and the forms of pleasures,
pains, and social interactions associated with it, will not be sustainable.
For the process to continue, the last drink must be not the last but a next-
to-the-last—one glass before the end. The last glass will take the alcoholic
over the edge into a new relational field harboring other relational quali-
ties. If the penultimate is passed and the limit reached, the alcoholic will
cross the threshold from intoxication to, for example, alcohol poisoning.
The threshold will have been passed from form-of-life to life-threatening
breakdown. New relational fields then await: the hospital, Alcoholics Anon-
ymous, possibly the cemetery. What “last” means must be continuously
recalibrated. The limit will be relative to any number of factors: the speed
of the drinking, the level of fatigue, the level of stress, and the quality of
the company. The intuitive evaluation of the limit will immanently mod-
ulate the relational field of alcoholic experience. If the limit is not reached,
the drinking will rebegin, following its own rhythm of intoxication and
sobering up. If the threshold is crossed, the result might be disastrous—or
healing. The necessary rebeginning might be a move toward a restorative
1 26
abstinence. Now life itself will have to function as its own power of intox-
ication, undoubtedly altering the field of relation and form of life.
The point is not that drinking is good or bad. That kind of moral evalu-
ation is made according to criteria extrinsic to the process. The immanent
evaluation of the process concerns only its continuing in the same rela-
tional field, or switching fields and form of life. When the process contin-
ues, it is because it has succeeded in affirming its own operations through
an immanent, qualitative, self-modulating evaluation. When it passes the
threshold toward change, it poses the existential question of what germi-
nal form of life and future qualities of experience lie beyond the threshold.
Although neither good nor bad a priori, in whichever way the limit-idea
plays out, the immanent evaluation it involves is never neutral. It ideally
contributes to sustaining and modulating, or regerminating, forms of life.
This makes it, of itself, a creative factor and force of life.
politico-aesthetic economies of relation

The forms of activity that will co-populate the field of relation of Generat-
ing the Impossible will be of many kinds, each with its own relational sub-
field, rhythm of event seriation, immanently modulating limit-idea, and
threshold to a necessary rebeginning. The enabling constraint of quasi-
chaos built into the event will create conditions of interference. How can
a philosophical talk and a VJ performance, for example, cohabit the same
space and time? What kinds of exchanges will be improvised to make
this cohabitation work? How will the heterogeneity of forms of life co-
composing the event enter into polyrhythmic “conversation”? What man-
ner of attunements will emerge? What modulations? Will some forms of
life capture or annex others? Will the forms of life entering the mix find
ways of exchanging limit-ideas so that their relational fields meld or enter
into symbiosis? Will a new limit-idea, never before occurring, emerge from
the singular playing out of the polyrhythmic relational field of the event?
Will the component processes attune to a limit-idea they invent among
themselves, across their relation, composing a collective individuation of
each and all together?
In a way, a shared limit-idea is already, at least germinally and provi-
sionally, provided for the event: the idea of “exploding the gallery.” This
idea qualifies the shared relational field of Generating the Impossible as a
field of art activity, with all that implies: the inevitable complicity with
the art market, the forms of monetary value and prestige-value driving the
propositions
1 27
art market, the tie-ins to the global neoliberal information economy and
the local culture-industries economy analyzed earlier. But the “exploded
gallery” qualifies this field “marginally”: at its limit. This raises for art the
question of the alcoholic: what artistic iteration might be the last “glass”?
If that limit is reached and a threshold crossed, what necessary rebeginning
lies beyond? What new abstinent intoxication of life awaits?
The aim of Generating the Impossible is to catalyze a collective mar-
ginalist experiment in artistic activity, flirting with the limit of art’s rela-
tional field, making felt the threshold that vibrates with it. What field
of relation might be expected to lie beyond the threshold? For us, there
is only one answer: the political. Generating the Impossible is an exercise
in the potential becoming-political of art, beyond its limit. To the extent
that the approaching of the limit succeeds in enacting a concertedly qual-
itative economy, one that is self-affirming as a polyrhythmic form of life,
the politics foretokened will be effectively anticapitalist.
Proposition 18
Give the Gift of Giving
potlatch
Generating the Impossible proposes to activate an art event that metamodels
the resonance between the aesthetic and the political through the creation
of a qualitative economy of relation. It proposes as a metamodeling tool
the concept of the gift. For the gift to function for this project, it must be
understood as a force of giving more than as an object of exchange. The
event proposes to reappropriate the force of giving as a force of life inven-
tive of new forms.
The subtitle of Generating the Impossible is “a potlatch for research-
creation.” We take our inspiration here from the practice of potlatch of the
First Nations peoples of the Pacific Northwest coast, a practice that involves
a ceremonial period of feasting followed by a lavish giving away, and some-
times destruction, of goods and property.43 Following Marcel Mauss’s writ-
ings as well as those of Georges Bataille and Jacques Derrida, we emphasize
that potlatch is a way of modulating the field of relation as a function of
its limit. What is shared is not so much wealth as the limit-idea of gather-
ing, in a manner that counteracts the stultifying tendencies of community
understood in terms of harmony. This is accomplished through an excess
of objects of exchange and their destruction. The excess of gifts creates
128
quasi-chaotic conditions nudging harmony toward polyrhythm. The

destruction of the gift leaves nothing but the having-given. It focuses
the experience on the event of giving and its iterations and modulations.
Potlatch is a practice for reorienting and remodulating the field of
exchangeability. This reorienting, as Mauss points out, involves a giving
of “a part of one’s nature” (1966, 10). We take this not to suggest a subject-
oriented view of donor and receiver, but as an acknowledgement that what
connects the social group is the sharing of the more-than of their individ-
ual subjectivities in the context of a ritual technique of hospitality and
event-based generosity.44
What is given, Mauss adds, is not inert (1966, 9). What is given is the
gift of giving itself, replete with resettings of the conditions for emergence
of the field of relation. Generosity as ritual technique occurs in a field of
relation that cannot be reduced to the giver as individual, or the object as
gift, or even the punctual connection between the two in a particular act
of giving. Potlatch is a giving for the event by the event. It is the setting
into motion of a platform for relation that activates the potential for modes
of collaboration, pushing exchangeability to its creative limit. In potlatch,
giving reorganizes the event-ecology of co-composition.
The gift of giving touches the limit. The “last” gift is the limit in relation
to which to the field of exchangeability maintains its rhythm and inten-
sity. In potlatch, giving reorients the field of relations without forcing a
complete undermining of the communities’ modalities of operation. In
tribal societies, the gift brings clans together for a celebration. The potlatch
wards off war by staging an activity that, like war, is excessive, but unlike
war activates the limit of the social field without crossing the threshold
into violence and completely unforeseeable consequences. Ritual plays a
key role here, creating an experiential space-time that diverges from, while
still composing with, everyday experience. Without the metastability of rit-
ual, without the practices that creatively reassess the limit from within the
bounds of the event itself, there is always a risk that the threshold will be
crossed into a different field of relation entirely. (The destruction of objects
of exchange also wards off capitalism by preventing the accumulation of
a surplus.) The giving of the event is how this technique of relation acti-
vates emergent comings-together and belongings-together, subordinating
the categories of donor and receiver to their continued co-involvement in
a shared process. A gift economy is not about the object. It is about Klee’s
propositions
1 29
line: the polyrhythmic force of expression that sustains and modulates

living-together, intuitively resisting calculation.
The gift of giving is ineffable, known only in the interruption it stages.
What it interrupts are tendencies that might move toward a crossing of a
threshold. This realigns the field of relation by repositioning exchange in
excess of human-centered reciprocity. The gift of giving belongs to excess,
immanent excess: a field of sociality overfull of its own rhythms and rebe-
ginnings, brimming with transindividual concern for the modalities of
exchangeability it calls forth.
The giving of giving is a ritual of emergent attunement that is a tech-
nique for reorienting the event of coming-together. It alters time. The now
of giving is already reorienting in a future-fielding of the moment. Giving
sets into motion an anticipation of the limit that futures the present in the
making in such a way as to make felt and simultaneously ward off a necessary
crossing of a threshold—in a kind of preemptive politics.
To the extent that potlatch wards off the crossing of the threshold, it
ensures a conservative function (in the most basic definition of the word,
as preserving or sustaining). It has a radicality as well, to the extent that it
makes intensively felt, as a creative factor, the same limit whose crossing it
preempts. Generating the Impossible means to play the limit of artistic activ-
ity, in the context in which we work, making felt the potential crossing of
its threshold—but without prescribing whether, when, and in what manner
the threshold is to be crossed. The decision to cross into a new relational
field—which in this case is not one of violence but is one of struggle—is
not the province of the event organizers, or of any individual. It can only
be a decision for the event by the event in respect of its processual autonomy.
a community without guarantees

Derrida suggests that the reorienting accomplished by the gift of giving—
the fielding of the future in the passing present of giving itself—must entail
an active forgetting, a Nietzschean radical undermining of time as mem-
ory of a present past (Derrida 1992, 16). As Nietzsche writes, “Forgetting
is not simply a kind of inertia, as superficial minds tend to believe, but
rather the active faculty to . . . provide some silence . . . to make place for
the new . . . those are the uses for what I have called an active forgetting”
(1969, 57–58). A gift economy orients time in an active forgetting of the
object and exchange as such.
The destruction of the gift in practices of potlatch is often misunderstood
130
as simply the destruction of actual objects. While it is certainly also a

destruction of wealth, the potlatch ritual is even more so an active for-
getting of the wealth itself through a foregrounding of the event-time
of giving. Forgetting activates the field of relation in such a way that the
emphasis is based no longer on the subject–object encounter (and all
the forms of ressentiment this calls forth) but on the ways in which this
singularity of expression activates a new kind of collective futurity. For-
getting, as Maurice Blanchot emphasizes, “ushers in a thought, a future, a
community without any guarantees.” This ushering is the giving itself—
not a gift of the past, but a gift for the future—“a leap into the unknown”
(Ramadanovic 2001). In Generating the Impossible, the usher of destruction
and forgetting will be the free radical.
If forgetting is the condition of giving, the gift is the sign of the impossi-
ble. As such, it cannot be thought in time. It evades the linear time-structure
of capitalist economics: the arrow of value-adding and accumulation.
Instead, it invents a time of the not-yet that will have been, a future-
anterior in and of the relational field of giving. Capitalism, as Joseph
Schumpeter famously stated, is also about excess and “creative destruc-
tion.” But it practices forgetting as a kind of inertia. It forgets to actively
forget, in order always to return to exchange in a way that ostensibly makes
it all about the object again. The capitalist economy continually translates
excess relational activity into objective surplus. It stockpiles objects and
instruments of exchange (material and immaterial) for eventual turnover,
as part of its market pricing mechanisms and investment cycles. In order
to do this, it is forever requantifying: translating the qualities of life associ-
ated with objects of exchange as found in their emergent field of relation
into quantitative measures.
As discussed earlier, research-creation participates in both the gift alter-
economy and the dominant quantitative economy. The art market is
no different than any other. It translates the excess relational activity
of research-creation into object-oriented surplus, even finding ways to
stockpile and quantitatively value “ephemeral art.” The prevalence of the
concern for new modes of documentation and archiving is a sign of the
art-economic times. Prestige-value, for its part, is ever renascent. The col-
lective evaluation at the limit in the model of the gift economy is back-
grounded, and the vicissitudes of the market itself, its arrow of measurable
value adding, are foregrounded.
The shift from a gift economy of excess to a quantitative surplus
propositions
131
economy happens when exchange-as-attunement loses its desirability.

The forgetting that tunes to the anticipatory environment of exchange-
ability is replaced by the arrow of quantitative value-adding. Reterritorial-
ized on the art institution as annexed to the art market. This dampens the
potential of artistic activity to create and participate as a force for modulat-
ing a relational field as a function of the limit and threshold. The expres-
sive force of art-work is dulled. It is no longer Klee’s line. It is an arrow of
objective accumulation: it is less force than form. Art too often surrenders
its potential to give time, to activate forgetting, to create conditions for
future thinking and doing, becoming.
Proposition 19
Forget, Again!
As long as the limit is not reached, it plays a positive role as a creative

factor in the process at whose margin it lies. Emergent attunement depends
on the invention of conditions to create directly qualitative relational
limits. These immanent limits are not unlike the “terminus” in William
James’s sense (the concept that figured so prominently in Dancing the Vir-
tual). Immanent limits only function if they actively invent modalities of
forgetting.
The ability of the in-folded limit to co-cause always another iteration
makes it a form in which the process feeds inventively off its own excess
in spiraling eternal return: always more than one. The relationship thrives
on productively metabolizing its own excess. It thrives on the strange asym-
metry of a terminus that twists into the core of the process, and becomes a
generative factor in its every rebeginning. The entire relationship, as a form
of life—with its singular lived quality, its unique affective economy—is gen-
eratively inflected as a function of the limit never reached at every moment.
Until it is. The terminus is not a point of arrival marking an external limit.
It is a point of perpetual redeparture, and occasional beginning anew. The
limit belongs to the event’s field of emergence, which the event process
carries with it across its iterations. It is part and parcel of what potentiates
the process’s power to self-continue: its relationability.
Generating the Impossible proposes, as a research-creation experiment, to
collectively co-compose what a directly qualitative, relational economy of
art might be. This involves immanently activating the limit beyond which
the gallery explodes. Beyond the limit, what threshold lies?
13 2
The threshold will always be evoked along with the limit. It reso-
nates with it, as the last is already pre-echoed in the penultimate. As long
as the penultimate is potentializing, the last remains a virtual pre-echo
of the becoming-other of the process. Activating the limit of art makes
its virtual passage into a political process resonate already in its aesthetic
unfolding. The exploded gallery is this politico-aesthetic resonance—this
play between the potentializing limit of art and its virtual threshold into
the political. Expressing this resonance is problematizing: it cannot but
ask, When? When, under what conditions, will or should the threshold be
passed? When, to what qualitative effects, composing what forms of life,
should the limit be respected?
call for participation

Generating the Impossible: A Potlatch for Research-Creation
Keywords: art and gift, economy of excess, exploded gallery
Art is not chaos
It is a composition of chaos
Step 1
Prepare for Creative Chaos
Forty artists, writers, theorists from all fields gather for a week’s retreat
in the woods. They have already met, virtually. The gathering has been
preceded by shared readings and anticipatory discussion. The prob-
lem: the works they will bring will populate the same event, but their
disparate requirements are bound to clash. Nothing is in place but an
unformatted space.
Step 2
Compose an Emergent Attunement
The week’s work will be to produce the conditions for a dynamic order
to emerge from the chaos of intended cohabitation. The challenge:
make the mutual attunement truly emergent, the product of its own
propositions
133
creative performance. Preconditioned, yes, but not foreseen or precon-

ceived. Self-curating event.
Step 3
Give Forth
The time: July 8–10, 2011. The place: the Society for Art and Technol-
ogy (Montreal), newly expanded with built-in immersive media plat-
forms and unpreprogrammed convivial spaces. The mission: activate
the building, and its immediate surrounds, with the works’ dynamic
coming into attunement. Invite the public to partake.
Step 4
Creatively Return to Chaos
As soon as the attunement has emerged, blow it asunder as creatively

as it built itself up. A “free radical”—a latter-day trickster figure—will be
loosed upon the event to joyously scramble the emergent order. Goal:
produce a generative breakdown in such a way that the public can take
a piece of the event with them when they leave.
Art is not chaos
It is a composition of chaos
Giving forth
Vision and sensation
Not foreseen, never preconceived 45
Proposition 20
Proceed
Postscript to Generating
the Impossible
Good-Bye Technological Arts, Hello Trees

The previous chapter, Propositions for Thought in the Act, was written as an
invitation to voyage. Its purpose was to convey a terrain collectively trav-
eled, in preparation for a coming foray. It was addressed to fellow travelers
already in the SenseLab network, and to others who might be inspired to
come aboard. It was a kind of conceptual bill of lading attesting to what
was coming in the collective baggage, not as an anchor to a particular past,
but more as a flotation device for the next lap. In its own terms, it was a
platform for relation for the open-ended continuation of a journey.
The destination was not premapped. Unimaginable in advance, where
the collaborative process could go was precisely the “impossibility” to be
“generated.” The invitation was for a collective pathfinding toward a des-
tination that would come into being en route. In the end, less a pathfind-
ing than a waymaking.
We were fully prepared for the open-endedness. What we were not
prepared for was losing our starting point before we set forth. The event
lost site of itself. During our year of planning Generating the Impossible,
the Society for Art and Technology (SAT) crossed a threshold we had
not anticipated. The renovations scheduled to improve the site and add
the immersive interactive dome dubbed the SATosphere were caught
in the aftereffects of the 2008 economic crisis. The resulting budget defi-
cit necessitated a rethinking of the SAT’s operating model. Henceforth, all
135
136
activities would be called upon to generate monetary returns. We could

still work at the SAT in the SATosphere, but the new model required proj-
ects that were not fully subsidized from outside sources to earn their keep
by bringing in a paying public. This was an obvious problem for a project
meant to explore the gift as a living critique of the neoliberal economy.
The SAT’s earlier proposition was that we “explode the gallery,” creating
flows that might open the site of art to cacophonous interventions poised
between modes of address (the conference paper), display (the art exhibi-
tion), and collaboration (the participatory installation), as well as opening
it onto its outside, reconnecting it to its urban surroundings. Now there
would be no “explosion.” The site’s modalities were given in advance, and
any experimentation would have to happen within its domed structure.
Not only that, but experimentation would be more regulated: channeled
toward exploring the potentials of a given artistic platform—that of this
particular immersive environment. This exerted pressure on artistic activity
to conform to a content-providing paradigm, prelimiting the eventfulness
of the process and its participatory intensity by reinstating a dichotomy
between the artist/technological expert and the paying audience. The site
thus went from being an open proposition (the SAT as spatial-conceptual
catalyzer of action, a platform for relation in building form) to a high-
stakes arena branded by its own proprietary technical system, one requir-
ing special access and inside knowledge. In addition, the SAT’s underlying
assumption in this new phase was that artistic activity should ideally pro-
vide “deliverables” to other sectors. The SAT was facing a Faustian bargain:
die an ignominious death by debt, or fall more into step with the enterprise
model of the neoliberal economy. Was it having the last “glass,” crossing
the threshold into a different relational field than that of the exploratory
community-based center it had been up to then?
It was clear that Generating the Impossible could not function within these
new conditions. The event had to remain open to its undoing. Even had
we had subsidies and been in a position to pay for access, the SATosphere
would have constrained us to a preestablished site that already presumed
to know how to manage what art can be, and what art can do. The shift
the SAT was experiencing seemed all too reminiscent of our initial con-
cerns about research-creation’s growing indebtedness to the capitalist econ-
omy and its enterprise model. Later, we would come back to the SAT with
a project to creatively explore the tensions surrounding this shift, but we
propositions
137
felt we would not be prepared for this until after Generating the Impossible
had carried our practices further. For now, we had to move on.1
This shift came late in the process. After months of working collectively
with the SATosphere in mind, those of us on the ground in Montreal liais-
ing with the SAT had to make a difficult call. We concluded that the event
needed to reorient, and sent out a message to participants. Our proposi-
tion: drop the site. Let the site be the city as a whole. But with a confound-
ing twist: let the site be the city as a whole—from the angle of the forest.
A proposition—and a provocation.
SenseLab participants embraced the proposition and the provocation
and set the process on a new eventfully self-organizing course. The prepa-
ratory discussions on the SenseLab’s online grouphub soon settled around
the concept of transduction.
As originally planned, we would start at the hunting camp at Mekoos,
deep in the northern wilds 250 kilometers from Montreal. The approach,
however, would be different than projected. Rather than starting from
purposely unprepared, quasi-chaotic conditions, we would set conditions
for structured improvisation in place as we had in the first three events. A
number of platforms for relation would be used to catalyze the collective
creative process in the forest setting toward the kind of emergent collec-
tive attunement we had always envisioned for the event. Then we would
break camp and head for the city. How could an emergent process catalyz-
ing in the woods be prolonged into the city? What does it mean to trans-
duce a creative process from one set of enabling conditions to another? If
the form, as well as its content, changes in the interval of transduction, is
it still the same process? Can a forest-conditioned process renaturalize in
and for the city, in a way that effectively brings something of the urban
environment to expression, in creative relation to its ex-urban surrounds?
Would that event constitute a contagion? A proliferation? A break? A vari-
ation? A tracing? Much discussion and preparation went into grappling
with these issues. The “diagram” (in Gilles Deleuze’s sense) emerged as a
pivot concept for attempting to understand, speculative-pragmatically,
what a transduction can do.
What follows is not meant in any way as a full account of the event in
all its speculative-pragmatic facets. Its aim is modest: to provide a brief nar-
rative account that gives a summary sense of how the event took shape as
it transduced its own initial sense of itself, as prospectively floated in the
Po st sc r ipt t o G e ne r at i n g t he I mp o s sible
138
preceding text, into a collective wayfinding affirming its own processual

autonomy in its journey from immersive dome to forest to city.
Affinity Groups
In the aftermath of the event’s reorientation to its loss of a starting point,
there came the necessity to find an organizational strategy conducive to
nonhierarchical, collective self-organizing that could at the same time
offer the mutual aid that might be necessary for life outside the city and
create the continuity that would be needed to keep the event together as
it shifted from the forest back to the city.
Originally used by anarchists during the Spanish Civil War, the affinity-
group structure has become a key organizational tool for nonhierarchical
social movements, passing through the antinuclear movements of the
1970s and 1980s, into the antiglobalization movement of the early 2000s,
and most recently into the Occupy Movement of 2011. An affinity group
is an autonomous decision-making unit, usually composed of five to fif-
teen people, networked horizontally. Its purpose is to distribute decision
making transversally across a larger group without resorting to a central
authority structure. There is no central leadership, even in the represen-
tative form of elected delegates to an executive group. Interaction moves
between autonomously organized small-group initiatives and assemblies
of all participants without differentiation by rank or function. The pur-
pose of the assemblies varies depending on the organizational needs, but
what they have in common is that they wield no coercive, disciplinary, or
even regulatory power. Their aim is not to produce conformity to a com-
mon program. The aim is to coordinate a heterogeneity of energies, trans-
forming them, in the back-and-forth between small-group interaction and
whole-group interaction, into creative synergies. The affinity-group struc-
ture works to enhance self-organization by conducting differences into a
symphony of collectively attuned initiatives, rather than reducing differ-
ences by funneling them into a common adherence to a directive set of
principles and strategies.
As with all SenseLab events, there was a daily movement between
whole-group interaction and small groups. The affinity-group structure
was another exploratory technique for creating a transversality that would
eclipse the tendency for “reporting”: as with other events, we were inter-
ested less in moving content from one group to another than in creating
fields of affect that could flow between them. For Generating the Impossible,
propositions
139
each day began with the larger group assembled together for work sessions
organized around a preselected series of philosophical readings.2 With the
affinity groups in place, we hoped the work of the large-group events would
trickle down into the rest of the day’s hands-on experimentation at the
affinity-group level, synergizing creative thought and action into an inte-
grated research-creation process.
Certain affinity groups formed organically in the months before we left
for Mekoos. Others were formally struck. There was one decreed enabling
constraint to their activities: while at Mekoos, each affinity group would
prepare one evening meal (paid for by the SenseLab) for the entire group
of fifty-four Generating the Impossible participants.3 The organization of food
provision was to be a convivial mirror of the overall organizational struc-
ture, with the shared evening meals playing the role of informal evening
assemblies. The planning for meals was a complex logistical task, espe-
cially since the remoteness of the location made it unfeasible to source
food once we were on the ground (the nearest grocery store was an hour
and a half away by car over country roads, some of which become impas-
sible when wet). The collective food platform involved all participants in
a logistics of mutual care that it was hoped would color the overall ethos
of the encounter.
Another task of each affinity group was to develop, in the months lead-
ing up to the event, a key concept to help trigger and orient Generating the
Impossible’s self-organizing. The concepts were drawn from readings pro-
posed to the whole group by individual SenseLab network participants. The
readings were discussed in regularly scheduled collective brainstorming
sessions on Skype. These whole-group sessions fed into and out of discus-
sions taking place on affinity-group-specific writeboards on the grouphub.
Each affinity group approached the preparatory concept work differently.
Some immediately threw themselves into meal planning, developing their
concepts and evolving group process around that activity. Others focused
directly on the transductive question of how to develop a distributive cre-
ative process across sites. Others organized weekly Skype reading groups
branching off from the main reading-focused sessions. In the end, key
concepts explored by affinity groups included tending, attention/attend-
ing, exaptation, emergence/emerging, and mapping/choreographing. All
of the concepts were developed with a view to setting in motion the col-
lective organization that would creatively enable the shift from the forest
to the city.
140
A second level of organization was set up to cut across the affinity-

group structure. Each participant was placed in a living situation at Mekoos
(a cabin) mixing members from different affinity groups. This was done
to create a framework for informal sharing of affinity-group-based expe-
riences and exploration. It was also intended to counter any tendency
for the affinity groups to develop into in-groups identifying themselves
against the group as a whole. The hope was that this system of cross-
solidarities would not only facilitate concept and technique contagion, but
would also produce crossovers between groups that would create the con-
ditions for emergent constellations preventing the organizational structure
from ossifying into rigid segmentations.
Food preparation has been an important part of all SenseLab events.
For Generating the Impossible, it played an even more central role because of
the convivial way it cut transversally across the levels of organization, both
cabin based and affinity-group based. This transversality occurred because,
practically, each evening meal had to be prepared in a given cabin. This
meant that each participant would spend significant amounts of time as
a guest in another cabin, and would host others in their home cabin. This
created a bridge of hospitality between the cabin and the affinity-group
structures. Food preparation was complex (think only of taking allergies
and other food requirements of fifty-four people into account). Each meal
comprised at least three courses, and affinity groups invested their creative
energies into making them artful and generative for the event as a whole.
Meals took at least a few hours to prepare (a full day for one affinity group!).
This meant that people would be moving in and out of activities of different
kinds, threading the food preparation into an active weave of the day. In
the care and effort taken to feed the group, an event-wide hospitality could
be felt that suffused each aspect of the everyday. Hospitality, practiced in
this way, produces an ethos of care, for the event, in the event. Pounds of
couscous, spaghetti squash, mangoes, and Persian rice were added to the
arsenal of concepts, as food preparation became an avenue for experiences
to be shared, ideas to be explored, and concepts to be artistically staged.
Eventfully deployed, food sharing can foster emergent forms of sociality
constituting qualitative alter-economies of differentially shared experience.
We were fortunate that among our participating artists was one with expe-
rience as a chef. Andrew Goodman was invaluable in the intensive role of
food consultant and meal-planning facilitator.
propositions
14 1
Gifting the Event

In the lead-up to the event, a great deal of thought was put into how we
would collectively cross the threshold and enter the event together in a
manner consonant with—more precisely, performative of—its ethos and
aims. An enabling constraint was put in place to perform the group transi-
tion into the event. In planning this constraint, we mobilized our guiding
concept: the gift economy.
Each participant was asked to bring a wrapped gift. The gift was to be
given to another participant, but was not for that individual. It was to
be a gift to the event, through that individual. The gift giving was an alter-
native to prolonged introductions. Its role was to energize the opening of
the event. Each SenseLab event has begun with an alternative to the ritual
of self-introductions. The problem with self-introductions is just that: they
are self-introductions. They bring people together based on preestablished
identities (professor, student, nonacademic; maker, theorist; dancer, chore-
ographer, media artist, philosopher) with histories of past accomplishments
shoring up that identity. However gently they are proffered, they implicitly
position, hierarchize, and divide. It would be disingenuous to hold that
it would be possible—or desirable—for personal histories and individual
identities to be neutralized and play no role, as if we could check them at
the door. The question is rather: what is being set in place that will quali-
tatively inflect the coming interactions when self-introduction is chosen
as the vector of entry? In what way does this prime the event and inflect
the qualities of its interactions? How else may the event be primed? The
SenseLab’s refrain in answer to this question is that there are other ways of
coming together that are tangential to identity and professional position-
ing (intersecting with them up to a point but enacting tendencies that are
not reducible to them, following trajectories that exceed their limitative
frame). The idea is to find ways of coming together that do not cement us
to our preformatted ideas of what we have to bring and who we will be
for the event. Instead, we endeavor to create technique-driven encounters
transversal to the identities in play (rather than in denial of or in opposi-
tion to them). SenseLab participants are invited to bring their care, their
concerns, their affinities, their passions, and most especially the techniques
in which these are performatively invested, and to enter the event along
those vectors. Generating the Impossible’s inaugural gift-giving ceremony
was set in place as an initial launching pad for this transversal exploration.
14 2
The gift-giving ceremony was based on a well-known game.4 All of the

wrapped gifts were heaped in one location, unmarked as to the identity of
the giver. As gifts “for the event,” they were meant to offer something that
could potentially be activated as an affordance or platform for relation in
view of the interactions to come. This would make each gift an offer of a
relational angle of involvement in the event that the recipient might later
activate. Participants were invited to come up, one by one, and choose
one gift. The catch was that when it was your turn, you could decide not
to open a new gift, but instead take a gift that someone else had already
received and unwrapped. Should you take someone else’s gift, the gift’s
original recipient would then be invited to choose a new gift. Participants
put a great deal of themselves into the gifts they gave, knowing that they
would be offered to the group anonymously. The anonymity of the gift-
ing made the “personality” of the gift an occurrent character of the event,
rather than an identifying marker of the source individual. The opportu-
nity to “steal” an already-given gift lent a ludic element to the ceremony,
making the exchange itself more performative and loosening the connota-
tion of the transfer of rightful possession that normally underwrites other
practices of gift giving. The gift-giving ceremony set in place a relational
unwrapping across the threshold into the event that exceeded the giver–
recipient duality. The gift was attached more to the collective potential that
might be deployed over the coming days than to the giver or the receiver.
This ceremony was one aspect of the gift economy at the basis of the
event. Over the year previous to the event, we had set up various ways of
creating informal funding and resource-sharing structures to ensure that
no participant was excluded for lack of funds.5 As with past events, we also
worked with a local grocer to supply low-cost food for on-site preparation
during the event.6 Montreal-based SenseLab participants offered couches
and extra rooms to accommodate those who chose not to or were unable
to pay for hotels for the city segment. And those of us with institutional
backing, or with personal funds to spare, pooled our money for allocation
on the basis of need. To the extent possible, the event attempted to acti-
vate alter-economies based on mutual aid.
The End?
Following the gift giving and the initial tasks generated by the affinity
groups, five forest days ensued dedicated to conceiving creative proposi-
tions that could be transduced to the city. As mentioned, each morning was
propositions
143
set aside for the concept work assemblies involving close collective readings
of a selection of philosophical texts, using a variety of techniques including
what has become the SenseLab’s signature technique of conceptual speed
dating (as discussed previously). Afternoons were focused on affinity-group
work sessions on site-conditioned projects bringing something of the forest
surroundings or camp environment to creative expression, always with a
view to their added potential for generating transductive bridges between
Mekoos and Montreal.
The largest and most visible proposition was the construction of a work
“for the forest” that came to be called The Mi(d)st: a 100-meter length of
repurposed mosquito netting that was painstakingly stretched across an
arm of the lake on the far end from camp. The Mi(d)st grew from a stray
comment from one participant about the captivating ephemerality of the
morning and evening mist that rose from the lake, crossed with a platform
for relation donated by Nathaniel Stern, who offered his rope-based “Sen-
timental Construction” concept to the group as a proposition for collec-
tive improvisation.7 The Mi(d)st “caught” the captivating mist in its net.
It also reflected its own form in the water, creating a play across surfaces
that visually expressed the interpenetration of processes the event sought
to produce on other levels. Alan Prohm also gifted a proposition for group
reappropriation growing from his “loom” projects, which are similarly
rope based. The Tubular Loom is strung, not unlike a spider web for people,
between site-specific structures (in our case, two trees). Once mounted, it
serves as an invitation to ungrounded movement as participants run, crawl,
or sidle through it, experiencing altered proprioceptive states.
Many other propositions were generated on site from affinity-group
activities. Some took an installation form; others were processual unfold-
ings exploring “diagrammatic” relations. Projects spawned other projects,
including a sound and image performance for/on the lake that saw itself as
a prolongation of The Mi(d)st by other means. One affinity group made it
their task to “tend” the process in its globality, insinuating themselves into
other affinity groups’ interactions in subtle ways intended to help leaven
their creative initiatives, perhaps without the beneficiaries of this proces-
sual intercession even being aware of it. Unfortunately, the space is lacking
here to go into the full richness of these explorations.8
As our time in the forest was drawing to a close, so too was the Technol-
ogies of Lived Abstraction event series. Generating the Impossible was meant to
be the final event in the series. The SenseLab has never differentiated itself
The Mi(d)st. Collective work based on a proposition by Nathaniel Stern.
Photographs: SenseLab/Ronald T. Simon
145
Tubular Loom. Collective work based on a

proposition by Alan Prohm.
Photographs: SenseLab/Ronald T. Simon
from its activities. Its mode of existence is entirely project based. It never
saw itself as an organization with a claim to existence separate from what
it does. It never aspired to become a self-preserving or self-reproducing
institution within which or in the name of which activities took place.
It takes its own dedication to the emergent and the ephemeral seriously:
it would continue to operate as long as its projects propelled themselves,
preferring to die rather than to ossify. The end of the event series thus
raised the inevitable question: had the SenseLab lived itself out? Had it per-
formed, to the best of its ability, its function of consolidating new ways of
coming together around research-creation techniques to create relational
environments? Did the mode of collective relational existence that was the
SenseLab still have a reason for being? Accordingly, on day five, SenseLab
founder and pivot person Erin Manning rather abruptly announced that
the SenseLab was no more. The declaration of its passing was a performa-
tive proposition posing a series of unsaid questions to the collective. Shall
we as a group resuscitate the SenseLab? If so, with what continuities and
what transformations? Is the energy and momentum there to justify its
continuance on processual grounds? Do we proceed from here? Have we
146
done our work, or is there still work to do? Or: have we done our work so
well that we risk becoming the institution we never wanted? How do we
proceed from here? Reinvent or perish.
It is part of the SenseLab’s basically anarchist inspiration to consider
that no grouping should endeavor to exist indefinitely, institutionalizing
itself around its own desire for self-perpetuation. At the same time, we
realize that no organization will ever be able to completely resist or forego
institutionalization. Manning was asking the group whether we had now
reached the end of the road, or whether the SenseLab was on the road
to becoming an institution in spite of itself. After a moment of shocked
silence, the answer came as a resounding no. There was still work remain-
ing to be done and a collective desire to embark upon it. Yet the question
did stage a performative shift: saying no to the question was tantamount
to affirming a collective responsibility for where the SenseLab would move
next. The eventual form this desire took was the next SenseLab event, Into
the Midst (play on The Mi(d)st intended), which brought us back to the SAT
more than a year later in October 2012. Into the Midst was to prove to be
the most integrally self-organizing SenseLab event thus far.9 The real gift
to the event was the investment participants made to continue “generat-
ing the impossible.”
Tending and Tentativeness

Generating the impossible is no humble proposition, but Generating the
Impossible was a humble event. Faced with the grandness of the proposi-
tion, we endeavored collectively to develop new ways of working together
across two distant and heterogeneous sites. Our hope was to touch on how
creative practices, and how art and politics, can co-compose in research-
creation. Many of the event’s undertakings were tentative, and remained
germinal. We had a few solid starting points: the readings, a year of col-
lective thinking, the Sentimental Construction and Tubular Loom prop-
ositions, the gift-giving passage across the threshold. But still, to come
up with a strong artwork, articulated with emergent conceptual intensi-
ties, within five days is a mammoth task by any standard. To do so with
people who in some cases you are meeting in person for the first time is a
challenge. We worked hard, in and across our affinity groups, taking joy in
little emergences, and keeping in mind that germinality itself, rather than
a finished product, was the goal: that the product was process. As always
for SenseLab events, the measure of success would be the intensity of the
propositions
147
next event this one seeded, as well as the creative partnerships formed
through SenseLab participation spinning off into extra-SenseLab collabo-
rations. Success for the SenseLab is centrifugal: the seeding of processual
spin-offs. The truest measure of the SenseLab’s success are successes for
which it cannot claim credit.
The ethos of tending and tentativeness moved with us when we
departed Mekoos for Montreal. By now, a strong sense of concern for the
event had developed. With it came a panoply of germinating propositions
for the city segment. As with earlier SenseLab events, a mode of decision
making had set itself in motion that was not based on a central authority or
representational delegation, nor on what is commonly considered the only
alternative to these: consensus. Decisions were self-making, based on the
singular force of each proposition. Anything that seemed worth trying—in
other words, anything with sufficient processual allure—would tend to
be explored. Yet only the strongest (most collectively potentiating) of the
many seeded initiatives would carry themselves into action, on their own
self-expressive steam. This autonomizing of decision rarely caused friction:
there is no end to potential ideas, and those not explored during Generating
the Impossible were understood as seeds storing potential for future events
that might germinate elsewhere at another time. It was this autonomizing
of decision that carried through the next event, Into the Midst.
An endeavor is at its most inventive when decision making works as a
cut in a process that enables new forms of collectivity to emerge in a next
unfolding phase. For this to work well it is necessary that actions embody
a “concern for the event,” and that an atmosphere and ethos has been
generated that sustains that concern. Much work must go into enabling
the event to do its own work, such that it is the global momentum of the
event itself that is followed and fed. This momentum may at times chan-
nel through an act or decision of a particular individual or subgroup. But
it is not owned by them. It channels through them, such that no one in
particular can take ultimate credit for anything that happens. In the end,
it is only the event that is a credit to itself.
Exploding the City?

Many thresholds were crossed, tendingly, tentatively, into the forest, around
camp, and from the forest back to the city. But no explosion occurred—
more like a scattering into the urban fabric. When the group descended
upon Montreal, a number of concurrent happenings unfolded. Some took
14 8
the form of choreographic explorations of the city’s movements. A sub-

group set about working on an urban iteration of the Mekoos-made version
of the tubular loom, re-sited to a vacant lot. Another scouted locations to
set up urban reemplacements of The Mi(d)st.
On our first evening back, The Mi(d)st was restrung in Saint-Viateur Park
in Outremont across a small moat separating the perimeter of the park
from an island pavilion at its center. A security guard cooperatively turned
a blind eye while the netting was installed and then came back later to
“discover” the deed and fulfill his duty to uphold city permit regulations.
The next day, we decided to hang it in a less patrolled location: the back
alley between two streets in Outremont. This was made possible by the fact
that two of us lived on the same alley and so we could string the lengthy
work from one third-floor balcony to another. A number of participants
spent the afternoon stringing. A few remained to gauge reactions while
others went off to participate in other evening activities, including a tie-in
event hosted by Artivistic, a sister organization of the SenseLab. The plan
was to meet back at the alley to celebrate the hanging of the work. Before
we met back, however, word was sent out by the members of the group
tending the work that a number of police cars had swooped into the alley
and surrounded The Mi(d)st while a large group of Hasidic Jews from the
surrounding neighborhood looked on, concerned because they had been
wrongly blamed for the offense. It turned out that the police had received
calls from certain people living in houses that backed onto that alley who
were enraged by what they took to be a religious takeover of secular space.
They had fantasized the humble Mekoos mosquito netting into an eruv: a
structure used to symbolically transform a segment of the public domain
into an extension of the private domain, thus enabling Orthodox Jews
who strictly observe the dictates of Shabbat to move more freely on that
day. Certain Montreal Hasidic communities practice a minimalist version
of the eruv consisting of wires strung so high between buildings as to be
all but invisible, in an attempt to avoid friction with defenders of Quebec’s
deeply ingrained secular order (not to mention its historically ingrained
anti-Semitic elements, present as a small but vocal minority in Outremont).
The Mi(d)st was mistaken for an imperialist act on the part of the Hasidic
community aimed at widening their religious kingdom to include this non-
descript alley. This hateful misunderstanding reminded us that a “trans-
duction” is site-conditioned on both sides. The results can never be fully
anticipated. Whatever is crystallized comes from a set of tensions or forces
propositions
The Mi(d)st. St. Viateur Park, Montreal.
Photograph: SenseLab/Ronald T. Simon
150
that are catalyzed into taking emergent expression. Although residents of

Outremont live in relative peace across religious communities and between
religious and secular orders, there are always latent tensions. In this Mon-
treal iteration, The Mi(d)st reflected the troubled waters of these latent ten-
sions, bringing them to an unintended, siren-screaming expression.
Another of the Montreal propositions that stood out also produced
unintended effects of a more convivial kind. One affinity group decided
to meet downtown at a local bus stop and ride the bus down its whole line
while reading aloud A User’s Guide to (Demanding) the Impossible, one of the
books featured in our preparatory concept work for Generating the Impossible
(available freely online). Affinity-group participants boarded the bus early
on a Sunday morning at the first stop on its line and sat at the back. Pass-
ing the book from one person to another, they staged a mobile recitation
and reading group. They had not known what to expect in terms of public
reaction. At one point, an earphoned teenager boarded the bus and sat, at
first unawares, among the readers. When it came time for the book to be
passed, it fell to him. Despite the surprise, he took off his earphones and
joined in. He was the first of many. The bus driver also became intrigued,
becoming so engaged in the action that, after reaching the end of the line,
he drove the bus off its route to drop the Impossiblers off at the vacant lot
where we were all meeting at the end of the day for a final urban potluck.
The Rise of the Free Radical

If Generating the Impossible as a whole succeeded in making the threshold
of an alter-economy of creative relation palpable, its most far-ranging, and
free-ranging, technique in this respect was the free radical.
The free radical was embodied for this event by one member of the
collective, Australian artist Paul Gazzola. While the free radical’s ultimate
role was to disentangle itself from individual embodiment and prolifer-
ate, for this first experimentation with the concept, we needed to give the
free radical a presence and operational form, and Paul was it. But he was
not it alone for long. Even before we reached Mekoos, the free radical had
radicalized itself through an unexpected multiplication. Suddenly, as if by
spontaneous generation, there were two, or more. Paul was multiplied by
self-appointed free radicals going by the monikers “Frank” and “FRank.”
Or was Paul the F®anks? Nobody seemed to know. The identity of the
F®anks was unknown, their position uncertain, and their role evolving over
a number of online sallies. All anyone knew for sure was that the operator
propositions
151
of the free radical had ostensibly proliferated in its anonymous enthu-

siasm to play its assigned role of “breaking down emergent attunement
after it has just emerged, but before it can stabilize into a self-sustaining
harmony that might assert itself as a model.” From the very outset, then,
the figure of the free radical spontaneously took off from Paul’s (or is it
FRank’s or Frank’s?) embodiment of it, all the better to work as a transver-
sal force for unsettling the collective attunement in the making, preventing
it from institutionalizing into a self-perpetuating structure.
This trickstering of the trickster figure made the free radical a looming,
unidentifiable presence. Since no one knew who or how many it was, its
interventions were not necessarily discernible. This meant that at each
stage of the event we were obliged to be on the lookout for occurrences
that might be laid to free-radical intercession. How the free radical might
be operative in the alter-economy we were creating was an ongoing, open
question. Through its perhaps spectral multiplication, the free radical came
to embody the event’s outside. It became the ubiquitous figure of an inter-
vening outside force of unsettlement that could not be definitively pinned
on any one individual or identifiable group of individuals within the larger
group. This apparition of the outside among us worked to remind us that
there was no absolute “inside” to the event. Its own transductive figure was
of the inside folding out, from Mekoos to the city and beyond.
The SenseLab does not exist “as such.” It is not an organization. It is
not an institution. It is not a collective identity. It is an event-generating
machine, a processual field of research-creation whose mission is to inside
itself out. Its job is to generate outside prolongations of its activity that rip-
ple into distant pools of potential. Ripple-effect: one idea becomes a seed for
organization, which becomes a proposition for a concept, which becomes
a problem for art, for politics, for philosophy, that may, if the conditions
are ripe, resolve itself into the triggering of an event of collective experi-
mentation and creative expression. This event potential is (dis)embodied
in the trickstered-trickster figure of the free radical, gone spectral. When
the conditions have been right and the event has been generated, it has
always come into itself in a relation with its radical outside—which it par-
adoxically generates flush with its own occurring, also immediately in rela-
tion to distant events beyond itself.
Notes
Coming Alive in a World of Texture

1. It is still too common to separate so-called “low-functioning” autistics from
high-functioning autistics. Like many on the spectrum, we reject this nomenclature.
All autistics function differently, and this functioning has effect on how they excel
in a largely neurotypically inflected world. As others within the autism activist com-
munity have pointed out, the labels that have become commonplace in autism in
many cases only serve to reinforce the assumptions of the neurotypical (or ableist)
community. See, for instance, Amanda Baggs’s blog post titled “Aspie Supremacy
Can Kill”: “I know that to many aspie supremacists it doesn’t feel like that’s what
they’re doing. It feels like they are just stating common sense, that aspies have more
valuable skills, more logic, less dysfunction, whatever, than other autistics. But that’s
because having a bit of relative privilege renders them unaware of the full conse-
quences of their actions. They don’t realize that they have things backwards—the
more devalued you are, the more you need equality, the more you need to be con-
sidered another important part of human diversity, etc. Not the less. And ‘less’ is
what aspie supremacy ends up meaning to those of us who (even when we have
some very valued skills in a few areas) are more vulnerable to devaluation and
all of its effects. Including the lethal ones” (2010d).
2. These same concerns open Erin Manning’s essay “An Ethics of Language in
the Making” (2013, 149).
3. “Mindblindness” is a term used to describe the inability to be aware of what
is in the mind of another human. It is associated to a lack of empathy determined
by the perceived inability to put oneself in another’s place. Simon Baron-Cohen was
153
154
the first person to use the term to help understand some of the problems encoun-
tered by people with autism and Asperger syndrome. See Baron-Cohen (1997).
4. See Ralph Savarese (2007) on the concept of “aroundness” in autism, partic-
ularly in regard to the poetry of Tito Mukhopadhyay in his forthcoming A Dispute
with Nouns, or Adventures in Radical Relationality: Autism, Poetry, and the Sensing Body.
5. The concept of the dance of attention is developed in Manning’s “The Dance
of Attention” (2013, 143–48).
6. We return to the role of colored shadows in our fourth chapter (“No
Title Yet”).
7. The concept of “taking account” is from Whitehead. It is one of the con-
cepts through which he extends a perceptual mode of operation (“prehension”)
to all things, independent of human perception. The notion of “taking account”
indicates that things (of whatever nature—he mentions “mud” and “evil”) “are
essentially referent beyond themselves.” By “referent” he means co-implicated a
process of mutual becoming exemplifying “forms of process,” understood as modes
of existence that call upon each other “essentially,” as an expression of their own
nature. Each kind of thing must be conceived as a form of process. The “realm of
forms,” Whitehead writes, is not an empty realm of pure abstraction, devoid of
dirt and passage. It “is the realm of potentiality, and the very notion of ‘potential-
ity’ has an external meaning. It refers to life and motion. It refers to inclusion and
exclusion. . . . Phrasing this statement more generally—it refers to appetition. It refers
to the development of actuality, which realizes form and is yet more than form. . . .
To be real is not to be self-sustaining. . . . Modes of reality require each other . . .
[they] express their mutual relevance to each other . . . each type expressing some
mode of composition” (Whitehead 1968, 69–70). When we refer to the flower striv-
ing to be taken account of (or, later in this essay, the pen “asking” to be chosen from
the field), we are referring to Whitehead’s theory of the “essential reference” of each
thing to others beyond themselves, as exhibiting an activity of appetition that is in
and of things (defined in terms of processual potential). This “striving” for expres-
sion of things as such is in no way meant to be taken as a metaphor. Although this
striving is independent of human perception, it is soliciting of human perception
wherever human perception is active in the field. What distinguishes this approach
from recent “object-oriented” approaches is that it gives primacy to “activity” and
“potential,” deriving the status of the “object” from a playing out of the “forms
of process” through which they tend toward determinate expression. The object,
for Whitehead, marks a phase-shift in process. It is understood more as an ontoge-
netic role than as an ontological category. For Whitehead, “object” refers to a par-
ticular role in the coming to determinate expression of potential, occurring at a
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particular turning point in its playing out. For “prehension” as an “uncognitive”
taking account, see Whitehead (1967b, 69–70).
8. We develop the notion of “cross-checking” from William James’s “ambula-
tory” theory of truth, according to which “truth” is less a self-founding abstraction
than an implicit recipe for finding the way back again to a specific “terminus” that
can be shared by different bodies, who may seal their sharing of this reaccess poten-
tial with a demonstrative pointing-to acknowledged by all. See the development of
the example of the walk to Union Hall upon which the argument of “A World of
Pure Experience” revolves in Essays in Radical Empiricism (James 1996, 39–90). See
also the “The Thing and Its Relations” in the same volume (92–122) and Pragmatism
and the Meaning of Truth (James 1978), passim.
9. It is important to specify that there is no homogeneity of “autism.” We do
not want to suggest that all autistics are joined in their perspective on the condition.
Certainly being autistic is a significant challenge in the multisensorial, fast-paced
culture we find in most parts of the world today. The point we wish to make is that
autism is also a gift—perceptually, experientially, intellectually. We challenge those
all along the spectrum of neurodiversity—especially those toward the neurotypical
end of the spectrum—to meet difference at least halfway.
10. On all these points, see Manning’s Always More Than One (2013), in which
she extensively develops the concept of “autistic perception.”
11. The slogan is from a T-shirt created by the Autistic Liberation Front, quoted
in Saner (2007).
12. The term “entrainment” is adapted from Albert Michotte, who uses the con-
cept of “entraining effect” in his analysis of the direct perception of causal relation
(1991, 149–215). We also mean it as a reference to Whitehead’s own concept for the
direct perception of causal relation, which he terms “causal efficacy.” Causal efficacy
refers to the sense that experience is “heavy with the contact of things gone by [refer-
ring to the immediate past, on the order of fractions of a second], which lay their grip
on our immediate selves.” In its purest form, it is “vague, haunting, unmanageable.”
In our reading, this sense of “unseen effective presences in the dark” is a limiting
case, because causal efficacy as a mode of existence is “essentially referent” to other
modes (see note 10), in particular the mode of “presentational immediacy.” Presen-
tational immediacy is the “vivid enjoyment” of immediate sense experience. By our
interpretation of these concepts, causal efficacy and presentational immediacy are
in all but extreme cases present in effective mixture (Whitehead calls it “fusion”), or
their mutual “taking account” of each other. Their fusion yields a variety of mixed
modes, one of which is what we normally think of as object perception. We are assert-
ing here that there is another mode that we are calling “environmental.” Whitehead
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himself focuses on the mode of presentational immediacy in its purest form, where
it is separated out from causal efficacy to the greatest degree. This occurs when quali-
ties of objects appear as abstractable from them (as “sense-data”). The differences are
of emphasis in the moment’s mode of composition or, in Whiteheadian terms, how
the moment asserts “importance” as it strives to be taken account of. The quotes are
from Whitehead (1927, 42–44).
13. “Entertainment” references Whitehead’s “presentational immediacy,” the
“vivid enjoyment” of immediate sense experience, as we interpret this category (see
note 12).
14. This is what we term “superposition” in a formative “zone of indistinction”
in the third chapter (“Just Like That”). In that chapter, the emphasis is different. It is
on the incommensurability between the modes entering into superposition: on how
each composes its own order, after its own manner, co-composing with others pre-
cisely in its difference from them. We convey this difference in co-composing with
the term “disjunctive synthesis.” In the third chapter, the notion is developed that
this superposition of modes occurs in an immeasurable interval of co-motional “sus-
pense.” This interval is a pulse in the rhythm of emergent process. From it, the modes
reemerge into their own operations and order in a next pulse. The third chapter is
concerned with the modes of language and movement as such. All modes are emer-
gent. A new mode emerges when a co-composing between existing modes gains a
consistency that constitutes a new order. The new order becomes self-propelling. Fol-
lowing its own tendencies, it becomes incommensurable to the modes from which
it took off. The “modes of existence” discussed in this chapter are emergences of this
kind. Their number is indefinite. The political stakes of the essay are that a new mode
can co-compose between neurotypicals and autistics (and other non-neurotypical
communities) that respects the diversifying ecology of modes of existence beyond
pathologization and exclusion.
15. Autistics emphasize, in their very approach to life, how the world dances to
attention as a field experience full of potential blooms, including outcomes deemed
neurotypical. It bears repeating that the autistics we are thinking with here—Tito
Mukhopadhyay, DJ Savarese, Amanda Baggs, Jim Sinclair, Larry Bissonnette, Sue
Rubin, and Jamie Burke—are “classically” autistic, which means that they suffer from
complex motor problems, including the inability to speak, and serious issues with
the activation or initiation of tasks, anxiety, echolalia, and so on. They can rarely
live completely without assistance. And yet their writing astounds in its complexity,
in its rhythm and tonal qualities, in its political astuteness. Ralph Savarese, poet and
father of DJ Savarese, notes, “While acknowledging the many challenges that accom-
pany the condition, proponents of neurodiversity insist that autism should not be
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pathologized and ‘corrected’ but, rather, celebrated as a kind of natural, human dif-
ference. The condition affords, especially at the so-called ‘low-functioning’ end of
the spectrum, with those who have been taught to read and to communicate, a range
of gifts. One of these gifts is poetic perception and writing. For decades it has been
assumed that Autistics are the victims of an obdurate literality, which leaves them
baffled by figurative language. While this may be the case with ‘high-functioning’
Autistics or those with Asperger syndrome, it is not with classical Autistics, who have
begun to demonstrate extraordinary competence. [. . .] Only recently have some of
these Autistics been exposed to creative writing instruction, and the results have been
nothing short of spectacular” (2010). See also Savarese 2008. For work by autistics
mentioned here as well as others in the Disability Studies community, see the spe-
cial issue on autism in Disability Studies Quarterly 30, no. 1 (2010).
16. The problem of reflective consciousness is directly connected, for autistics, to
the disconnect between voluntary and automatic movement—a disconnect associ-
ated with the difficulty they experience with the activation of a task. Amanda Baggs
writes, “I have known for a long time that my relationship to voluntary movement
is not the same as my relationship to automatic movements, that there is in fact
quite a large difference between the two, and that I process automatic movements
as ‘background’ but don’t process voluntary movements that way. And that most
movements for me are not automatic, but require finding the body part and mak-
ing it move around for me in a fairly laborious way” (2010b).
17. For a thought-provoking interview on being on the spectrum (from which
the quote in the text is drawn), see Corwin (2008).
18. For more on phenomenology in contrast to process philosophy, see “Won-
dering the World Directly,” Manning (forthcoming a).
19. Our use in this section of “physical pole” and “perceptual pole” should not
be confused with Whitehead’s distinction between the “physical” and “mental”
poles, to which he gives a particular meaning free of the cognitive presuppositions
involved in the physical/percept distinction as it functions on the derivative level
of reflective consciousness.
20. For a critique of neural correlates and a theory of brain function compatible
with process philosophy as we understand it, see Ruyer (1950).
21. For Henri Bergson, consciousness arises when automatic action-reaction cir-
cuits are interrupted. The mechanism of consciousness is to inhibit or slow down auto-
maticity. The interruptive gap between action and reaction is filled with tendencies
(germinal “forms of process,” as in note 10) vying for actualization. It is their vying
that we experience as “our” thinking. This germinal activity of forms of process striv-
ing for expression brinks into consciousness, but in its first stirrings, in the fullness
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of its activity, it is nonconscious by nature. The emphases of conscious experience
are, for Whitehead also, predicated on the “elimination” of not-fully-determinate
formative activity. Elements of what is eliminated from the central focal region of
consciousness persist vaguely in the surrounding “penumbral” region forming the
periphery or background from which clear consciousness stands out. The penumbra
of consciousness is semiconscious. This semiconscious surround of consciousness
makes consciousness, however focused, however eliminative, a variegated field phe-
nomenon. It is the fielding of consciousness that comes out for itself, as a mode of
experience in its own right, in what we call “environmental awareness.” Environ-
mental awareness is full of entrainment but also exerts a force of entertainment (in
Whiteheadian terms, as we interpret them, it is saturated with causal efficacy, but
also has a degree of presentational immediacy in fusion with it). On consciousness
and inhibition of activity, see Bergson (1911, chapter 1). On elimination, see White-
head (1978, 187–88 and passim).
22. For a continued exploration of the ecology of diversity, see “An Ethics of
Language in the Making” (Manning 2013, 149–71).
A Perspective of the Universe

1. To facilitate the reading of this chapter, the subsequent citations from
Arakawa and Gins will be abbreviated to AG.
2. For more on bare activity, see Massumi (2011, 1–3, 10–11).
3. In our third chapter (“Just Like That”), we analyze this “simultaneous con-
trast” using the term “disjunctive synthesis” and the withness of an infinitude of
alternate forms as the “any-point” of movement.
Just Like That

1. The descriptions in this essay are based on video documentation of the Sep-
tember 29, 2001, presentation at the Frankfurt Opera House performed by Prue Lang
and Richard Siegal; the authors’ experience of several of the performances of the 2011
revival run of the piece (November 18–20, 24–27, and December 2–4, 2011, Bocken-
heimer Depot, Frankfurt); and the authors’ studio observations of the rehearsals lead-
ing up to the 2011 performance, which included the creation of a new piece, Whole
in the Head. In the 2011 run, Woolf Phrase was performed by three pairs of dancers
on different nights, Cyril Baldy/Esther Balfe, Cyril Baldy/Prue Lang, and Roberta
Mosca/Tilman O’Donnell. The piece originally premiered on March 15, 2001, at the
Frankfurt Opera House.
2. In what follows, words spoken in the performance of Woolf Phrase are indi-
cated in bold. All these phrases are from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, with the
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exception of the apocryphal anecdote about Virginia Woolf and the Dalai Lama
(discussed below).
3. On the rhythm and milieu, see “Of the Refrain” in Deleuze and Guattari
(1987, 310–50).
4. The first part of this phrase is spoken repeatedly by both dancers in the 2011
revival of Woolf Phrase.
5. The concept of simple location is famously critiqued in Whitehead (1967a,
49–55, 58).
6. On the concept of the activation contour, see Stern (1985, 57–59) and Mas-
sumi (2011, 107–14, 122–25).
7. On transduction, see Simondon (2005, 31–33, 107–10 and passim) and
Combes (2012, 6–9).
8. On the amodal, see Stern (1985, 47–53) and Massumi (2011, 17–18, 109–13,
122–23).
9. Sheets-Johnstone (2009a, 2009b) critiques the concept of the sensorimotor
in embodied cognition and enactive perception theory on similar grounds. See, in
particular, Sheets-Johnstone (2009a, 377, 394–95; 2009b, 221).
10. On syllogism and generality, see Deleuze (1990, 294–97).
11. For Sheets-Johnstone’s critique of embodiment, see Sheets-Johnstone (2009a,
390, 392, 393; 2009b, 215, 220).
12. On the “relation of non-relation” (65) between language and vision (their
incommensurability and disjunctive synthesis), see Deleuze’s analysis of “visibilities”
and “statements” in the work of Foucault (Deleuze 1988, 47–69): “What we see is
not lodged in what we say” (64; translation modified). For Klee on the gray point as
originary any-point of “primordial” motion, which Klee places at the center of the
color wheel, and thus of the visual field, see Klee (1978, 3–4).
13. On the thirdness of experience and the “sea” of traces as reserve of potential
(specifically as regards sound and language), see Massumi (2012).
14. This term was suggested to us by Sheets-Johnstone’s essay “Sensori-Kinetic
Understandings of Language” (2009b, 219–52). The term occurs on page 236. Sheets-
Johnstone emphasizes the overlap (what we would term a “superposition” or “zone
of indistinction”) between language and movement in the motions of the body
that are physically productive of speech. She uses the term “motional-relational”
for that overlap and to argue that nonlinguistic dimensions of experience are not
“prelinguisitic” but rather that language is “post-kinetic” (225). We take the concept
of the post-kinetic in Sheets-Johnstone to imply a disjunctive synthesis between
language and movement, rising from and returning to their zone of indistinc-
tion, as each come into themselves coming into and out of each other. For our
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16 0
part, we reserve the term “motional-relational” for movement in its own order, as
it co-composes disjunctively-synthetically with the “notional-relational” order of
language, emphasizing how both orders, in their co-composing, overspill the sen-
sorimotor (and even Sheets-Johnstone’s far more adequate “sensori-kinetic”), into
the suspension of nonsensuous perception.
15. Whitehead develops the concept of the mental and the physical as two mod-
ally distinct yet inseparably bound “poles” of every occasion of experience (White-
head 1978, 239, 248–49 and passim).
16. For an extended analysis of cueing and aligning in the work of Forsythe, see
“Choreography as Mobile Architecture,” Manning (2013, 99–123). On cueing more
generally, see Massumi (forthcoming).
17. Forsythe has developed a unique approach to accessing proprioception for
his choreographic process. He teaches his dancers to use their skin surface as an
organ of proprioception more than of touch. The stretching of the skin registers the
spray of the movement forming the differential gestural nexus. The dancers are asked
to activate their bodies through their skin, making the skin what Deleuze would call
the “surface of recording” or “abstract surface” of whole-body events of thinking-
feeling. “Put the activation into every part. Think about where the movement starts
and stops. If you raise your arm, where does your skin stretch? (Down the side). Acti-
vate the skin. . . . Get feedback from the skin. Go further if it tells you something.
What you feel is what you know. Look for the chain of sensations rather than the
chain of positions” (Forsythe 2011, Nov. 10).
18. See Forsythe (2013).
19. There are other resets besides touch. The many-times-repeated PAAF! is a
vocal reset that operates on the cusp of language, where speaking, sounding, and
gesture coincide. The Dalai Lama’s mirror is another rest. In Woolf Phrase, the mirror
plays a deviant role. It actually blocks vision from self-reflection, infusing otherness
into identity.
No Title Yet
1. For more details on this process and further analysis of the Eurydice series,
see Massumi (2006).
2. The “originality” of the image is, in fact, already compromised: it is a remix
between a family photo and a historical photo.
3. On light, force, and the spiritual in Ettinger’s work, see also Manning (2011).
4. Earlier essays by Manning (“Love the Anonymous Elements,” 2013, 177–
83) and Massumi (2006) deal at length with the two-way movement of appearing-
disappearing in Ettinger’s work.
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161
5. Note that “intercessor” in Deleuze (1995) is mistranslated into English as
“mediator.”
6. On this “deterritorializing” function of the face, see Deleuze and Guattari,
“Faciality” (1987, 167–91).
7. In Massumi (2006), the movement of the gaze was analyzed as constitutive.
This function of the gaze is tied to the interplay of light and dark that organizes the
Eurydice series. The coming to prominence of the interplay between transparency
and white in the No Title Yet series passes through this phase, to move beyond the
gaze. As if accidentally, this shift largely corresponds to the artist’s studio moving
from Paris, where the paintings descended and ascended between the light of the
studio space and the darkness of the basement, to Tel Aviv, where they participate
in the relation of the studio to its outside, as described earlier.
8. The translation has been modified to conform to the wording of this phrase
as quoted in Deleuze (1986, 93).
9. On all these points, see “The Brightness Confound” (Massumi 2002, 162–
76) and “The Diagram as Technique of Existence” (Massumi 2011, 87–194).
10. Deleuze is specifically describing the “qualitative face” as it appears in a scene
of Josef von Sternberg’s cinematography. Deleuze terms the anti-expressionism of
light’s adventure with white “lyrical abstraction” (1986, 116–17).
11. In our first chapter (“Coming Alive in a World of Texture”), we wrote of the
coinciding of experience with imagination. Here, imagination is being used in a more
restricted sense, as traditionally understood as being an act of a separate subject.

1. On immaterial labor, see also Hardt and Negri (2000, 289–94, 364–67) and
Virno (2004, 12–16).
2. In the academic context, these issues are linked to “strategic research
plans.” See, for instance, Concordia University’s Strategic Research Plan
(http://oor.concordia.ca/formsandreferencedocuments/strategicresearchplan). Note
the introductory sentence: “Concordia University’s academic culture celebrates
research, creativity, and the transfer of knowledge in many ways that are ideal for
today’s innovation driven society.” It is also noteworthy that in discussing the cluster
“Technology, Industry, and the Environment,” an area that explicitly targets research
done in the fine arts through the multimedia new technology laboratory titled Hexa-
gram (in collaboration often with engineering and computer science), there is very
little emphasis on the processual nature of the fine arts; the focus is instead on the
wider socioeconomic (neoliberal) stakes of the work. “Telecommunications research
at Concordia is focused on digital and wireless telecommunications, wireless access
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162
networks, and fiber-optic and satellite broadband communications. There is a recog-
nized strength in the areas of intelligent control systems, very large scale integrated
systems, hardware verification, pattern recognition, game development, and bioin-
formatics. Areas of research intensification include computer security, signal pro-
cessing, speech signal processing, artificial intelligence, natural language processing,
semantic web applications, interactive media, and identification technologies.”
3. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada
ran a pilot program starting in March 2003 titled “Research-Creation Grants in Fine
Arts.” The program was made permanent starting in 2010–11. The corresponding pro-
gram at Quebec’s provincial level, administered by the Fonds Québecois de Recher-
che sur la Société et la Culture (FQRSC), is still in operation.
4. Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, “Research-Creation Grants
in Fine Arts,” http://www.sshrc.ca/funding-financement/programs-programmes/
fine_arts-arts_lettres-eng.aspx. For a discussion of the history of research-creation in
Canada and an analysis of the concept, see Chapman and Sawchuk (2012).
5. This took the form of the adoption of a research model imported from the
social sciences. The social science research model was prioritized from the outset:
“The research must address clear research questions, offer theoretical contextualiza-
tion within the relevant field or fields of literary/artistic inquiry, and present a well-
considered methodological approach. Both the research and the resulting literary/
artistic works must meet peer standards of excellence and be suitable for publication,
public performance or viewing” (ibid.). This is not to say that the current toward new
media arts wasn’t already active in Montreal. Institutions like the Society for Arts and
Technology have always felt a deep kinship with the notion of research-creation,
supporting interdisciplinary and intercommunity work. They are themselves influ-
enced by the Dutch “V2: Institute for Unstable Media,” an arts center dedicated to
research-creation in new media arts for both on-site exploration and publication.
See Brouwer, Fauconnier, Mulder, and Nigten (2005) and the award-winning Inter-
act or Die! (Brouwer and Mulder 2007).
6. See http://hexagram.concordia.ca, http://www.hexagram.uqam.ca, and
http://hexagramciam.org.
7. In 2010, a group of researchers in the fine arts convened to discuss new
ethics regulations requiring fine arts faculty members and students to seek ethics
approval for all work that includes participation. The curtailing of artistic freedom
by the bureaucracy of an ethics approval process is a further instance of art moving
toward a model of the social or hard sciences. For more on the “Ethics and Research-
Creation Study Day,” see Herland (2010). As Lynn Hughes, cofounder of Hexagram,
artist, and associate dean, remarked, “The question is how to have an ethical practice
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163
without shutting down artistic practices that, for example, choose to be provocative
in order to focus and stimulate public debate” (quoted in Herland 2010).
8. Quartier des Spectacles Montreal, http://www.quartierdesspectacles.com.
9. The closest English equivalent would be the “Culture and Entertainment Dis-
trict.” The chief artist for the plan was prominent light designer Axel Morgenthaler
(Photonic Dreams, http://www.photonicdreams.com). Many other well-established
local artists were also involved in the project. Artists involved in the concept for per-
formance halls include Jacques Tessier, Guy Desrochers, Gérard Souvay, Gilles Arpin,
Luc Courchesne, Marianne Mercier, Marc-André Boudreau, Nomade Architecture, and
Axel Morgenthaler. Many participating artists were chosen through grant-based fund-
ing initiates. For the city’s presentation of the lighting plan, see http://ville.montreal
.qc.ca/portal/page?_pageid=7557,81658025&_dad=portal&_schema=PORTAL.
10. “Projet touristique de 25 millions. Exit les condos, bonjour l’art tech-
nologique,” La Presse, July 8, 2010, Affaires, page 1.
11. For more information on the Society for Art and Technology (SAT), see their
website: http://sat.qc.ca.
12. See the ISEA website: http://www.isea-web.org.
13. The issue of PhDs in the fine arts has become increasingly relevant in this
context.
14. Innovative research around research-creation in Montreal includes Sandeep
Bhagwati’s MatraLab (http://matralab.hexagram.ca/matrapeople/sandeep-bhagwati);
Sha Xin Wei’s Topological Media Lab (http://topologicalmedialab.net), the network-
ing/gaming initiative orchestrated by Lynn Hughes and Geoffrey Rockwell titled
iMatter (http://www.humanities.mcmaster.ca/~imatter/), the Université de Montre-
al’s Institut Arts Cultures Technologies (http://www.iact.umontreal.ca/site/), Hexa-
gram (see note 6), Luc Courchesne’s projects with the SAT (http://courchel.net),
Chris Salter’s Lab X Modal (http://xmodal.hexagram.ca), as well as a list too long to
mention of artists working on independent projects under the mantle of research-
creation. Internationally, among many others, there is Andrew Murphie and Anna
Munster’s Dynamic Media project (http://www.dynamicmedia.com).
15. The cynicism often lies under the surface, either taking the form of a rejec-
tion of research-creation as a “new turn” (this criticism is accurate: research-creation
is a modality of creative practice that has always existed) or taking the form of the
reaffirmation of the theory–practice divide with an exclusionary emphasis on one
side or the other. The point we are trying to emphasize is not that research-creation
in itself is a “new” practice, but that we can take this politico-economic juncture as
a starting point to redefine how research and creation practice modalities of inter-
twinement that give us new ways of conceiving both creative practice and research.
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164
16. Isabelle Stengers, Groupe d’études constructivistes (GECO), http://phi.ulb
.ac.be/domaine_02.php.
17. The first issue of the SenseLab’s online journal was dedicated to the ques-
tion of research-creation, with contributions from a number of SenseLab event par-
ticipants. See “How Is Research Creation?,” special issue edited by Alanna Thain,
Christoph Brunner, and Natasha Prevost, Inflexions: A Journal for Research Creation,
no. 1 (May 2008), http://www.inflexions.org.
18.
Dancing the Virtual, http://www.dancingthevirtual.blogspot.com. The
call for participation is available at http://senselab.ca/wp2/events/dancing-the
-virtual-2005/. Thirty participants were chosen on the basis of their response to
the call, which brought the total to forty, including the core SenseLab committee.
Invited participants included those listed at http://senselab.ca/wp2/participants/.
19. On the concept of the movement of thought, see “Conclusion: Propositions
for Thought in Motion” (Manning 2009, 213–28).
20. The movement exploration for this event was “relational movement.” For
a more detailed exploration of this movement practice, see “Incipient Action: The
Dance of the Not-Yet” (Manning 2009, 13–28).
21. Despite the lack of funding, everyone who committed to Dancing the Virtual
attended and, with the exception of two participants, returned for the subsequent
event, Housing the Body, Dressing the Environment. Certain eligible components of
subsequent events were funded by grants from the SSHRC.
22. We make a distinction between “relationality” and interactivity based on
the mode of causality (co-causal and fostering emergence of the new in the first case,
and linear and reproductive of function in the second). On this distinction, see “The
Thinking-Feeling of What Happens” (Massumi 2011, 39–86).
23. A Basecamp grouphub was set up for online interaction in advance of the
event.
24. On the concept of the terminus, see “The Ether and Your Anger: Toward a
Speculative Pragmatism” (Massumi 2011, 29–38).
25. On the need for “sobriety,” see Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 279).
26. See http://senselab.ca/wp2/events/housing-the-body-dressing-the-
environment-2007/.
27. The concept was proposed by Owen Chapman, who has continued to
work with the “ice xylophone” in his own artwork (http://www.opositive.ca/files/
opositive.html).
28. Other platforms included “Into the Night,” “Dancing the Environment,”
“Becoming Responsive,” “Fashioning Skins,” and the already mentioned “Around
Architecture” and “Sound Surrounds.” There were also three food-related platforms,
one organized for each evening.
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165
29. This was especially the case in academic contexts that were becoming more
and more economically driven, such as in Australia and the United Kingdom, where
the assessment review began to prioritize only standard academic contributions (such
as peer-reviewed journals) for the advancement of its employees.
30. See Andrew Murphie’s website, http://www.andrewmurphie.org.
31. See SenseLab, Society of Molecules, http://senselab.ca/wp2/events/society-of
-molecules-2009/ and http://theaterofmemory.com/societyofmolecules/. The phrase
“society of molecules” was lifted from Whitehead (1968, 157).
32. On diplomacy as technique of relation, see Stengers (2011, 374–85).
33. In cases where the host might leave during the five-month period, allow-
ances within the movement profile had to be made. This became quite interesting,
as it might require another member of the local molecule to move into another’s
movement profile.
34. On the Freephone project, see SenseLab, “San Diego,” Society of Mole-
cules (http://senselab.ca/society%20of%20molecules/sandiego.html); for a main-
stream press account, see http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2009/05/
freephone-project.html.
35. See issue 3, “Micropolitics: Exploring Ethico-Aesthetics,” Inflexions (http://
www.senselab.ca/inflexions/volume_3/main.html).
36. The term “emergent attunement” was suggested to us in the context of self-
organizing events by Heidi Fast (2010). We reinterpret it in the context of Daniel
Stern’s work on “affective attunement” (Stern 1985, 138–61).
37. See the Fibreculture Journal special issue on “Metamodels” (2008).
38. Technically, in Deleuze and Guattari’s vocabulary, it is a “machinic assem-
blage” (1987, 71, 145).
39. Australian artist Paul Gazzola (http://paulgazzola.blogspot.com) kindly
accepted the SenseLab’s invitation to play the role of free radical.
40. On the concept of prearticulation, see Manning (2009, 5–6, 216–17).
41. On singularization (“qualification”) as lying at the basis of the process of
capitalist product development (despite its finally quantitative principle of function-
ing), see Callon, Méadel, and Rabeharisoa (2002). On the self-driving, value-adding
form of life called “human capital” as the generic subject of capitalism and its ulti-
mate product, see Foucault (2008, 226–32, 243–45).
42. For details on the specifically capitalist functioning of the limit as organiz-
ing a field of relation and on its “marginalist” evaluation, see Deleuze and Guattari
(1987, 440–41).
43. “Those who gave away or destroyed the most property earned the great-
est social prestige. Anthropologists have described the ceremonies as a form of ‘war
with property.’ The potlatch also had important elements of economic distribution,
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16 6
social bonding and political processes, all central to the maintenance of a society.
The Canadian government considered the practice to be destructive of the stability
and established hierarchy of native communities and it was outlawed (from 1884
until 1951) and rigorously suppressed.” Robert Drislane and Gary Parkinson, “Pot-
latch,” Online Dictionary of the Social Sciences, produced by Athabasca University and
ICAAP, http://bitbucket.icaap.org/dict.pl?alpha=P.
44. It is important to note that there is little theoretical writing from Pacific West
Coast First Nations on the potlatch. It comes up as a context more often in poetry
and literature, which suggests that for the writers it has a tendency to morph based
on the specific conditions of its coming to be. In reading Mauss’s accounts (1966),
we must therefore keep in mind that his approach was always anthropological and,
as such, tending toward the generalization of the practice. His vocabulary is also
one that is informed by the economics of his time and his location: capitalism. The
challenge is to read across Mauss to find, as Derrida (1992) does, the openings,
the inconsistencies, and the contradictions within his accounting of a practice so
foreign to his cultural bias.
45. Adapted from Deleuze and Guattari (1994, 204).
Postscript to Generating the Impossible

1. The project in the SATosphere was titled Into the Midst (October 15–22, 2012).
Its aim was to problematize the relationship between the SAT and its urban surround,
between the floor space of the SATosphere reserved for the audience and the pro-
jection surface of the 15-meter-high dome, and between the participatory process
and ways of opening its intensities to a public. See http://senselab.ca/wp2/events/
into-the-midst/. For accounts of this event by participants, see also Intelligent Agent,
special issue on Into the Midst (forthcoming).
2. Readings were as follows: day 1: Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought,
chapter 8, “Nature Alive”; day 2: William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, chapter
4, “How Two Minds Can Know One Thing”; day 3: Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics,
chapter 3, “Culturing the Pharmakon,” and chapter 5, “Introductions”; day 4: Félix
Guattari, Three Ecologies (entire essay); day 5: Arakaw and Gins, unpublished essay
on biotopology.
3. Participants in Generating the Impossible, with their countries of residence at
the time of the event, were Faiz Abhuani (Quebec), Kenneth Bailey (United States;
Montreal segment only), Laura Balladur (United States), Lisa Benson (New Zealand),
Lone Bertelsen (Australia), Marie-Pier Boucher (Quebec), Christoph Brunner (Swit-
zerland), Noyale Colin (United Kingdom), Laura Cull (United Kingdom), Jaime Del
Val (Spain), Pia Ednie-Brown (Australia), Aphra Ednie-Brown (Australia), Charlotte
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167
Farrell (Australia), Barb Fornssler (Canada), Jonas Fritsch (Denmark), Paul Gazzola
(Australia), Diego Gil (Netherlands), Andrew Goodman (Australia), Saara Hannula
(Finland), Sophie Le-Phat Ho (Quebec), Mike Hornblow (New Zealand), Annette
Svaneklink Jakobsen (Denmark), Mazi Javidiani (Quebec), Thomas Jellis (United
Kingdom), Jondi Keane (Australia), Erin Manning (Quebec), Brian Massumi (Que-
bec), Kevin Mitchell (Canada), Mayra Morales (Mexico), Lincoln Mudd (United
States), Mahasti Mudd (United States), Andrew Murphie (Australia), Andreia Oliveira
(Brazil), Raphael Ng (Singapore), Toni Pape (Quebec), Leslie Plumb (Quebec), Vir-
ginia Preston (United States), Alan Prohm (Finland/Germany), Jean-François Prost
(Quebec), Ana Ramos (Quebec), Stellaluna Ramos (Quebec), Alessandra Renzi (Can-
ada), Troy Rhoades (Quebec), Nicole Ridgway (United States), Nonie Ridgway Stern
(United States), Felix Rebolledo (Quebec), Ronald Rose-Antoinette (France), Bianca
Scliar (Brazil), Ron Simon (Quebec), Stephanie Springgay (Canada), Nathaniel Stern
(United States), Bodil Marie Thomsen (Denmark), Sean Smith (Canada), and Alanna
Thain (Quebec). Mary Zournazi (Australia), Michael Goddard (United Kingdom), and
Celine Sumic (New Zealand) participated in the preparations but were unable join
us for the event itself.
4. This is sometimes called a white elephant gift exchange.
5. Participants were solicited using the call reproduced at the end of Propositions
for Thought in the Act. The cutoff was nine months before the start of the actual event,
to leave adequate time for preparatory activities. A few participants who contacted
us late in the process were put on a waiting list and later admitted to the event. We
wanted the event to be as inclusive as possible, and worked to keep possibilities open
for anyone expressing a serious interest.
6. All the food for the SenseLab events has come from the Fruiterie Mile-End,
a family-owned Montreal landmark. In the spirit of the gift, the Fruiterie has always
charged us wholesale prices and provided us with older produce free of charge.
We consider the neighborhood ethos provided by the Fruiterie (and by its owner,
Javed “Bob” Iqbal, in particular) as very much in keeping with what the SenseLab’s
attempts to achieve through its event series.
7. http://senselab.ca/wp2/events/into-the-midst.
8. For additional (but by no means complete) documentation, see http://
senselab.ca/wp2/events/generating-the-impossible-2011/.
9. For more on the issue of decision making and self-organizing in the Into the
Midst event, see “Dancing the Constraint” (Manning forthcoming b).
Not e s
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Re fe re n ce s
Index
abstract: form, 91; line, 69, 115; and affect, 20, 24–26, 54, 80, 99, 101,
metamodeling, 116; movement, 106, 118; and economy, 131; and
101; and potential, 41; surface, intensity, 98; and speech, 34. See
160n17 also attractors; attunement
academics: economy and, 84–86, 88, affective tonality, 22, 34, 48, 98–99
121, 161n2, 165n29; event and, 90 affinity, 87, 90, 99, 102; groups, 138–
action: field of, 4–5, 50; -reaction, 43, 146, 150
157n21; sensorimotor schema affordance, 7–11, 16–18, 99–100,
and, 38–39; thinking-in-, 89 110, 142. See also causal efficacy;
activation, 32, 36–37, 65, 68, 94, chunking
96–97, 117, 120, 156n15, 157n16, Agamben, Giorgio, 66
160n17; field of, 47, 54; and agency, 24–25, 29
movement, 40 aligning, 7, 18, 44, 46–47, 56, 129,
activation contour, 36–37, 50, 159n6 160n16. See also cueing
activism, vii; autism and, 153n1; alter-economy, 105, 122–23, 130, 140,
cultural, 87 142, 150–51. See also economy
activity, ix, 5, 20, 28, 32, 62, 101, 117, amodal, 37, 41, 47, 159n8. See also
145, 154n7, 158n21; co-activity, nonsensuous: perception;
8, 14, 122; collaborative, 104; cre- sensation
ative, 85–86; of the field, 13, 116, any-point, 35, 37, 39–43, 50–51, 54,
124–25; form of, 126; mode of, 87; 55, 158n3, 159n12. See also center-
neural, 19–20; relational, 12. See point; movement: spray; position
also bare activity; in-act appetition, 5, 8, 154n7
actual, 65, 154n7; actualization, apportioning out. See chunking
157n21 Arakawa, Shusaku, and Madeline
adaptation, 38–40, 42 Gins, 23–30, 101, 166n2; on
1 75
1 76
apportioning out, 23; on archi- 25–26, 29–30, 42, 42, 62, 69, 76,
tectural surrounds, 24, 29, 101; 78, 86, 88, 114, 119, 131, 157n16,
on landing sites, 24, 25, 28; on 158n21
organism that persons, 29 Bacon, Francis (philosopher): on
architectural body, 24–25, 29 perception, 23, 28, 30
architectural surround, 24–25, 28–29, Baggs, Amanda, 3, 22, 153n1, 156n15;
101 on movement, 157n16; on read-
art: and culture industries, 84–90; ing, 18
and economy, 121, 130–31; and bare activity, 24, 28–29, 158n2
event, 98, 115, 120, 151; and Baron-Cohen, Simon: on mindblind-
“exploded gallery,” 110–11, 127; ness, 3–4, 153n3
exploration, 69; as mode of Bataille, Georges, 128
thought, vii–ix; and the political, becoming, 20, 29, 51, 69, 77–78, 131,
72, 106, 110, 120, 126–27, 132, 135– 154n7; -body, 39; -crystalline,
36, 146, 151; site of, 136. See also 79; and ecology, 28; and field,
interactive art; new media art 6; -human, 22; -imperceptible,
articulation, vii, 46, 66, 146; double, 72, 76; -other, 132; -political, 127;
118–19; pre-, 40, 118–19, 165n40 powers of, 122; -visionary, 47, 49
Artivistic (collective), 148 Benjamin, Walter: on nonsensuous
as-if, 49–52, 56. See also if-then; similarity, 37, 50–51
what-if Bergson, Henri: on brain and con-
Asperger syndrome, 154n3, 157n15 sciousness, 157n21
assemblage, 60, 116, 124; machinic, Bertelsen, Lone, 106
165n38 biopolitical, 100
attention, 4, 13, 15, 55, 72, 91, 100, Bissonnette, Larry, 156n15
139; economy of, 112. See also Blanchot, Maurice: on forgetting,
dance of attention 130
attention-deficit disorder, 11 body/bodying, 6, 10, 11, 13, 20, 23–
attractors, 99, 101 24, 28–29, 38–45, 47–48, 93, 100,
attunement, 64, 69, 116–20, 123– 110, 117, 160n17; architectural,
24, 126; affective, 30, 165n36; 24–25, 29; and becoming, 28, 39;
collective, 137–38, 151; emergent, human, 52; and movement, 91,
112, 114, 117–18, 120, 129, 131, 159n14; and perception, 23, 28,
133, 137, 151, 165n36; field of, 119; 30; schema, 38; and thought, 45
relational, 118, 124 brain, 19–21; Bergson on, 157–58n20
autism, 3–22, 153n1, 155n9, 156n14, Burke, Jamie, 156n15
156n15, 157n17. See also mind-
blindness; neurotypical capitalism, 121–25, 129, 130, 165n41,
Autistic Liberation Front, 7, 155n11 165n4; anticapitalist action, 127;
Autistwork painting series (Ettinger), as capture, 124; “creative,” 84. See
72–74, 76 also economy; labor: immaterial;
limit; neoliberalism; value
backgrounding, 7–8, 11, 13, 15, 18, care, 108–9, 140; and event, 114
In d e x
177
Caspersen, Dana: on double vision, 96–97, 105, 110, 117, 127, 139–41,
46 143, 150–51; and art, 101; of the
causal efficacy, 155n12, 158n21. See body, 38; and force, 94, in-the-
also entertainment; perception; making, 89; minor, 96–97, 106;
presentational immediacy and relation, 45; speed dating,
causality. See causal efficacy; 96, 143; of transduction, 137; and
co-causality work, 90–91, 98. See also thought
centerpoint, 39, 42. See also any- concrescence, 29
point; movement: spray; position conditions, 89, 93–94; enabling, 10.
chaos, 132–33; creative, 114–15; qua- See also enabling constraints;
si-, 114, 116–17, 119–20, 128, 137 techniques
Chapman, Owen, 164n27 consciousness, 14–17, 26, 30, 38, 157–
chunking, 17–18, 23–25, 28 58n21; reflective, 19–20, 157n16,
clouding, 60, 68, 72, 74, 76, 77–78, 80. 157n19
See also light; white contagion, 31, 102, 106, 110, 117, 137;
co-causality, 93–96, 98, 101, 114, 119, processual, 104, 108; of tech-
123, 131, 164n22 nique, 140
co-composing, viii–ix, 5–7, 21–22, contour, 36, 59, 72, 74, 76, 78; activa-
44, 46, 50–51, 55–56, 68–69, tion contour, 36–37, 50, 159n6
119–20, 122, 126, 128, 132, 156n14, contrast, 4, 10, 18, 33–34; and intensi-
160n14; of polyrhythms, 122. See ties, 33; simultaneous, 26, 158n3.
also composition See also disjunctive synthesis;
cognition, 15–17, 20, 23; embodied, pattern
19, 38, 159n9 co-poesis, 66, 68
color, 4, 12, 16, 18, 22, 60, 65, 68, Corwin, Anne, 17
74, 76–78, 154n6; affect and, 80; Cosmopolitics (Stengers), 166n2
-field, 77–78; Goethe on, 77; Klee counterpoint, 47, 50–52, 54–56
on, 41, 159n12; more-than of, 68. creativity, vi–viii, 84–85, 88–89, 94,
See also colored shadow; light; 104; creative energy, 87; creative
white expression, 143, 151; creative po-
colored shadow, 4–5, 12, 22, 77, tential, 103; creative practice ix,
154n6. See also color; field-effect 88, 94; creative process, 102, 139;
common, 108–9 creative relation, 105, 123, 150;
commotion/co-motion, 4–5, 12–16, and dance, 40; field of, 66; and
19, 40, 43–46, 48, 51–52, 114–15, thinking-feeling, 65; and thought,
156n14 69. See also research-creation
composition, vii–ix, 4, 6, 8, 17, 31, critique: immanent, 87, 123
33, 60, 115, 128, 154n7, 156n12, cross-checking, 6, 11, 155n8
156n14; of chaos, 132–33; econ- cueing, 38, 44, 47–48, 52, 56, 118,
omy’s, 123; of experience, 21–22; 160n16. See also aligning
and field, 10; improvised, 118;
self-, 19. See also co-composing Dalai Lama, 45–46, 51, 159n2, 160n19
concept, vii–viii, 21, 39, 87–88, 91–93, dance, vii–viii, 31–36, 38–40, 42–48,
In d e x
178
50–52, 54, 93–94; and form, 46; ecology, viii, 22, 109, 156n14; and be-
of prearticulation, 119 coming, 28; of diversity, 158n22;
dance of attention, 4–6, 8, 10, 12, 17, and event, 128; of practices, 28
21, 29, 154n5, 156n15; and autistic economy, 84–86, 105, 114, 120–24;
perception, 6 affective, 131; of attention, 112;
Dancing the Virtual event (SenseLab), capitalist, 121–22, 130; creative,
90–101, 103, 131, 163n18, 164n21 85; gift, 129–31, 141; knowledge,
da Vinci, Leonardo, 63, 64, 69 84, 122; neoliberal, 87, 123, 127,
Deleuze, Gilles, 63, 137; on affect, 80; 136; noncapitalist, 123; polyrhyth-
on intercessors, 64, 65; on lan- mic, 123; of relation, 127, 132. See
guage, 48; on light, 77, 78, 161n10; also alter-ecomomy
on the line, 72; on the mental effect, 52, 74, 94, 97, 106, 115, 118–19,
image, 80; on the middle, 33; on 132, 150, 153n1; aftereffect, 135;
the milieu, 33; on philosophy, co-causal, 101; emergent, 93;
vii; on the power of the false, 68; entertaining, 155n12; and force,
on the power to rebegin, 79; and 68; processual, 104; ripple-, 151;
skin, 160n17; on thought, 69 sound, 32; visual, 36. See also cap-
Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari Félix, italism; labor: immaterial; limit;
87, 96, 99; on the abstract line, neoliberalism; value
69; and assemblage, 116; on embodied cognition, 19, 38, 159n9
exchange, 124–25; on limits, 124; embodiment, 39, 159n11
on machinic assemblage, 165n38; emergence/emergent, 5, 11, 16, 20,
and molecules, 106; on writing, 28–29, 44, 77–78, 89–90, 93, 114–
viii 16, 118, 122, 128, 139, 145–46, 156,
Derrida, Jacques, 128 164n22; act, 68; and collectives,
deterritorialization, 99, 118, 164n25 ix; dance of attention, 17; envi-
diagram, 137; and relation, 143 ronment, 7, 18; experience, 4;
difference, 4, 23, 33–34, 36–37, 39, 42, expression, 150; field of, 119–20,
49, 52, 56, 108 132; field-effects, 76; forms, 123,
differential, 33, 35–36, 39, 55, 56, 65– 140; multiplicity, 12; of the new,
66, 108–9, 114, 140, 160n17 92; patterning, 19; process, 137;
digital art. See interactive art; new relation, 6, 103, 128, 130; tech-
media art nique, 96
diplomacy, 107; and relation, 165n32 empathy, 4
disjunctive synthesis, 33–34, 37, 46, emphasis, 7, 156n12; economy of, 113;
49–51, 156n14, 158n3, 159n12, relational, 18; resonant, 118; by
159n14. See also middle; milieu; subtraction, 18, 20–21
fusion enabling constraints, 92–97, 102, 104,
distance, 36, 42, 45, 49, 55, 64–65, 106–7, 112, 114, 117, 120, 139, 141
68–69, 72, 74, 76, 78–79, 106. See entertainment, 7–14, 17–18, 155–
also intercessor 56n12, 155n13, 157–58n21. See
also perception; presentational
Ecologies, The Three (Guattari), 166n2 immediacy
In d e x
1 79
entrainment, 7–11, 12, 15, 18, 155– planes of, 42; pure, 19; qualities,
56n12, 157–58n21. See also causal 125–26; shared, 140; thirdness of,
efficacy 159n13; tonalities of, 98
environment, vii, 3–9, 11, 18, 28, 65, experimentation, 87, 94, 97, 100, 104,
106, 116, 156n12; acoustic, 45, 51, 110–12, 117, 123, 127, 132, 136, 139,
57; relational, 64 150; collective, 151; techniques
environmental awareness, 9–10, 15, of, 103
17, 21, 158n21; field, 13 exploded gallery, 110–12, 114, 117,
Essays in Radical Empiricism (James), 127, 132, 136
97, 166n2 exploration, 94, 99, 101, 103, 112,
ethics, 86; of engagement, 92, 106; 140–41, 143, 158, 162; artistic, 69;
regulations, 162n7 choreographic, 148; movement
Ettinger, Bracha, 59–80; on color, of, 164n20; thirdness of, 95
74; on force, 62; on the history expression, 5–8, 10–12, 14, 16, 22,
of painting, 69; on the painting 30, 89, 108, 115, 120, 122, 154n7,
process, 59, 62 158n21; anti-expressionism, 79;
Eurydice painting series (Ettinger), 59, collective, 123; coming-into-, 115;
62, 72, 74–76, 160n1, 161n7 creative, 143, 151; emergent, 150;
event, 4–5, 8, 11–16, 20–21, 25–26, of the event, 4; of the field, 10;
29, 32, 37, 65–66, 89–112, 114–17, force of, 68, 94, 129; linguistic, 17;
119–20, 122, 125–29, 132, 136–38, singularity of, 130; technical, 89
140–42, 145, 147, 150–51; academ-
ic, 90; aesthetic, 115, 120; of emer- face, 24, 59, 62–66, 68–69, 72, 74, 76,
gence, 89–90; experiential, 19–20; 78–79, 161n6; of the city, 86
-formation vii–viii; and future, 89, failure, 103–4, 110
147; of research-creation, 90–91, feeling, 29–30, 33–34, 43, 54, 64, 66,
self-curating, 133; and time, 130 68, 80, 98; for movement, 35–36,
exchange, 94, 124–26, 130, 142; as 39; and seeing, 68–69; and tone,
attunement, 131; economies of, 10, 50. See also thinking-feeling
114, 124; object of, 127–29; proces- field, 6–11, 13–18, 29–30, 36, 40, 62,
sual, 108 65–66, 68, 76, 78, 90, 93, 114,
existence: mode(s) of, 6, 8, 11, 17, 22, 120, 127, 154n7; of action, 50;
154n7, 155n12; Whitehead on, 28 of activation, 47, 54; of activity,
experience, 5–8, 10–11, 13–14, 16–17, 116; aroundness, 4, 6, 154n4; of
21–22, 28–29, 34, 37, 39, 48, 54, attunement, 119; color, 77–78;
64, 86, 112, 123, 128, 140, 157n16; compositional, 5, 10; conceptu-
and autism, 155n9; and causal al, 97; of creation, 66; cultural,
efficacy, 155n12; of chaos, 114; 85; of emergence, 119–20, 132;
conscious, 158n21; and event, 19– environmental, 13; of exchange-
20; everyday, 128; fields of, 4, 8, ability, 128; of experience, 4,
12, 17, 19–22, 24, 52, 156n15; and 8, 12, 17, 19–22, 24, 52, 156n15;
imagination, 161n11; mode of, field-with, 28; future and, 129; of
57, 158n21; occasion of, 160n15; motion, 36; of painting, 62–63;
In d e x
18 0
of participation, 98; perception operational, 150; organizational,
and, 66; point-field, 35–36, 39; of 90; realm of, 154n7; of relation,
potential, 24–25; qualitative, 125; 123; technical, 102; trace-forms,
of relation, 64, 122, 125–31, 136, 60, 62–63, 76, 76, 80; visual, 37,
165n42; research-creation, 151; 40–41. See also subjective form
resonant, 14, 74; of sociality, 129; Forsythe, William, 40, 44, 46–47; on
and time, 63; of vision, 77 action, 39; on the body, 39, 43;
field-effect, 9–11, 13–15, 18, 21–22, on centerpoint, 39; on counter-
76, 86 point, 50; and cueing, 160n16;
figure, 59–60, 62–64, 66, 68–69, 72, on dance, viii; on movement, 34,
74, 76, 78; and background, 25; 35–36, 41; on position, 36; and
transductive, 151 proprioception, 160n17
folding/infolding/unfolding, 7, 13, Forsythe Company, 31–32, 34–35,
28, 29, 32, 33, 38–40, 42–43, 46–47, 49
45–52, 54–56, 65–66, 77, 89, 91, Foucault, Michel, 60, 64; on the
97–99, 102, 108, 114–15, 119–20, friend, 68
131–32, 143, 147, 151 framing: ix, 69, 85, 92–93, 140, 141
Fonds Québecois de Recherche sur freephone project, 109, 165n34
la Société et la Culture (FQRSC), free radical, 117, 130, 133, 150–51
162n3 friend, 63–66, 68–69, 72, 74, 80. See
force, 4, 29, 48, 55, 62–65, 68–69, also intercessor
72, 74, 79, 93–94, 97, 104–5, 131, fusion/interfusion, 4, 24, 25, 29,
148, 160n3; attractive, 103; co- 103, 156n12. See also zone of
compositional, 6; creative, 94; indistinction
-effect, 68; of expression, 68, 94, future, 44–48, 50, 56, 65, 119, 126,
129, 131; of formation, 116; gen- 129–31; collective, 130; and event,
erative, 98, 115; of giving, 127; of 89, 147; and fielding, 129; and
life, 123; notional, 41; organizing, form, 52, 55; noncapitalist, 123
97, 106; outside, 151; performa-
tive, 98; relational, 12, 115; of gaze, 43, 47–48, 64–65, 74, 161n7. See
thought, 63, 69; transversal, 151; also sight
visionary, 49–50 Gazzola, Paul, 150–51, 165n39
foregrounding, 6, 8, 15, 25–26, 30, 62, generality, 38–40, 97, 159n10
69, 76, 112, 119, 122, 130–31 Generating the Impossible event (Sense-
forgetting, 129–31 Lab), 110–12, 115–17, 120, 126–27,
form, 25–26, 36, 43, 47–48, 54, 60, 129–30, 135–41, 143, 146–47, 150,
62, 64, 66, 69, 74, 78, 80, 89, 93, 166n3, 166n5; call for participa-
127, 131, 146–47; abstract, 91; of tion, 132–33, 164n18
activity, 126; architectural, 101; gesture, viii, 31–34, 36–37, 42, 116,
and dance, 46; dynamic, 13–14, 118–19, 141, 160n19; of touch, 52.
16, 42, 115; future and, 52, 55; ge- See also movement
neric, 116; of life, 122–27, 131–32; Gibson, James, 36
of movement, 40–41; novel, 49; gift, 95, 104–5, 108–9, 127–32, 136,
In d e x
181
141–43, 146, 167n6; economy, 119, 122, 126, 137; collective, 143;
129–31, 141 and composition, 118
Gil, José: on movement, 91 in-act, 68, 72
Gins, Madeline. See Arakawa, Shu- indistinction, zone of, 156n12. See
saku, and Madeline Gins also fusion; superposition
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: on individuation, 115, 122; collective, 30,
color, 77; on white, 77–78 54, 126; processes of, 122
Goodman, Andrew, 140 inflection, 39, 42; of language, 31; of
gravity, 16, 44, 47, 93 movement, 32; point of, 54
Guattari, Félix, 166n2; and metamod- Inflexions: A Journal for Research-
eling, 115–16 Creation (SenseLab), 110, 163n17
in-formation, 11, 115
habit, 17–18, 21, 38–40, 47, 54, 98–99, intensity, 12, 20, 30, 33, 45, 48, 62–
107; and experience, 16 63, 68, 94, 100, 128, 136; affective,
harmony, 116–18, 128. See also poly- 98; conceptual, 146; and relation,
rhythm; rhythm 79; vibratory, 30, 62, 69
Hexagram (Concordia University), interaction, viii, 5, 12, 59–60, 105–6,
85, 161n2, 163n14 108, 138; social, 125; versus rela-
hospitality, 86, 99–101, 107–8, 140; tion, 164n22
technique of, 128 interactive art, 87, 101, 110–12, 114,
Housing the Body: Dressing the Environ- 135, 136
ment event (SenseLab), 100–105, intercessor, 63–66, 68–69, 79, 143, 151.
109, 164n21, 164n27, 164n28; call See also friends
for participation, 102 interference, vii–viii
Hughs, Lynn, 162n7, 163n14 intermodality, 8, 17. See also exis-
human, 3–4, 6–7, 28–29; becoming-, tence: mode(s) of
22; body, 52; more-than-, 4, 66; Inter-Society for Electronic Arts
perception, 154n7; relation, 66 (ISEA), 87
interval, 40, 42, 64–65, 68–69, 96–97,
identity, 34, 109, 141–42, 160n19; 137, 156n14; relational, 52, 69; of
collective, 151; cross-checked, 11 transduction, 137
if-then, 37–38, 41, 44, 49–50. See also Into the Midst event (SenseLab),
as-if; what-if 146–47,166n1, 167n9
image, 5–6, 11, 20, 60, 63, 65, 69, 72,
74, 78, 80, 160n2; found, 59; and James, William, 97, 115, 131, 166n2;
movement, 91 on consciousness, 14; and pure
imagination, 80; and experience, experience, 19; on quasi-chaos,
161n11 114; and truth, 155n8
immanent critique, 87, 123 joy, 4, 10–11. See also self-enjoyment
imperceptible. See perception: and
imperceptible Klee, Paul, 129; on the grey point, 41,
importance, 29–30 159n12; on rendering the visible,
improvisation, 92–95, 101, 103, 114, 115
In d e x
182
Krumins, Daina, 3, 4 Michotte, Albert: on entrainment,
155n12
labor: immaterial, 84, 122, 161n1 middle, 33–34, 36–37, 41–42, 46–47,
landing sites, 23–25, 28–29, 44, 46, 65 49, 51, 54–55. See also milieu
Lang, Prue: on metascoping, 48; on Mi(d)st, The (Stern/SenseLab), 143–44,
movement, 50; on telescoping, 146, 148–50
47 milieu, 12, 28–30, 32–33, 35–36, 43–
language, 6–7, 10, 13, 16–17, 31–35, 45, 48, 51, 159n3; associated, 6;
language (continued) rhythm and, 45, 49, 54. See also
–38, 41–42, 48–51, 54–57, 66, 98, middle
119–20, 156n14, 159n13, 159n14; mindblindness, 3, 153n3. See also
spoken, 3; and vision, 159n12 autism
life, 4, 26, 29, 36–37, 42, 123–24, 126; modes, 24, 29, 45, 49, 55, 97, 136,
force of, 123; forms of, 121–27, 156n14; of activity, 87; of the
131–32; life-living, 30; qualities as-if, 51; of exchangeability, 129;
of, 130 of existence, 6, 8, 145, 154n7,
light, 18, 59–60, 66, 69, 76–80, 86, 155n12; of experience, 57, 158n21;
160n3, 161n7, 161n10; and vibra- of experimentation, 97; of expres-
tion, 68–69. See also white sion, 89; of forgetting, 131; of the
limit, 6, 21, 31, 40, 42, 46, 49–51, 54, just-like-that, 46; of operation,
56, 80, 101–3, 105, 111–12, 114, 128; of practice, 94; of relation,
124–29, 130–32, 165n42; limit- 18; sense-, 112, 115; of the specula-
idea, 124–28. See also threshold tive, 46; of the what-if, 48
line, 64–66, 68, 72, 74; abstract, 69, Modes of Thought (Whitehead), 166n2
115; of event, 115–16; of flight, modulation, 18, 115, 119, 126, 128–29;
123; of intensity, 48; Klee’s, and environment, 65; and event,
129–31; of movement, 35–36, 40, 4, 93; and experience, 13; and
42–47; narrative, 50; of thought, field, 8, 13, 131; and interaction,
viii; witch’s, 48, 51, 54 91; self-, 103, 126
location:19; modal, 24–26; simple, Monet, Claude, 63–65, 68–69
24–26, 35, 159n5 more-than, 18, 28, 50, 64–65, 72, 128;
of color, 68; -human, 4, 66; as the
machinic assemblage. See assemblage in-excess, 33; of movement, 35;
Manning, Erin, 90, 145, 146; on the -one, 45; -present, 116; represen-
dance of attention, 154n5 tation, 69. See also multiplicity;
mathematics, 11–13 subtraction
matter of fact, 29 motional: motional-relational, 42–43,
Mauss, Marcel, 127; on potlatch, 128 46, 48, 159n14; notional and, 45,
memory, 10–11, 17, 64 50–52, 54
mental, 38–39, 41; image, 80; pole, movement, vii, 4, 9–10, 31–57,
157n19 59–60, 62–63, 65–66, 76, 78, 80,
metamodeling, 115–17, 123, 127 91–94, 96, 120, 156n14, 157n16,
159n14, 160n17; any-point of, 35,
In d e x
183
37, 39–43, 50–51, 54, 55, 158n3, and motional, 45, 50–52, 54; and
159n12; embodied, 101; exercis- relational, 160n14
es, 98; minor, 99; patterns, 109; No Title Yet painting series (Ettinger),
profile, 107; relational, 43, 52, 60–62, 67, 69, 71, 76, 161n7
54, 164n20; spray, 35–37, 39, 41,
43–44, 47–48, 54, 160n17; and object, 5–11, 15–17, 19–20, 24–25, 124–
technique, 44, 46; and texture, 11; 25, 129–30, 154n7; of exchange,
and thought, 41, 45, 65, 91, 101; 127–29; of perception, 155n12
vibratory, 74. See also centerpoint; objectile, 5, 7, 9
position occasion, 28; of experience, 160n15
movement-moving, 41–42, 44–45, organism-that-persons, 28–29
47–48, 52, 54–55, 57. See also organization, 90, 93, 106, 109, 125,
thinking-feeling 140, 145–46, 151; of the body, 43,
Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf), 31, 47, 49–50, 47, 48; collective, ix, 139; self-,
54–55, 159n2 112, 122, 138
Mukhopadhyay, Tito, 5–7, 11–16, 22, outside, 64–66, 68, 72, 74, 78, 151;
156n15 of thought, 69. See also friends;
multiplicity, 3, 7, 12, 19, 28–30; of intercessor; interval
modes of existence, 8. See also
more-than; subtraction painting, vii–viii, 59–80
Murphie, Andrew, 96, 106, 163n14 participation, 65, 90, 92–93, 98, 110,
117, 147, 162n7
neoliberalism, 84–85, 87–88, 105, past, 56, 65, 129–30, 135; immediate,
123, 127, 136. See also capitalism; 155n12. See also time
economy; labor: immaterial; pathological, 21
limit; value patience, 24–25, 29
neurodiversity, 8–9, 11,17–19, 155n9, pattern, 4, 10, 18, 33–34, 118; holding,
157n15 49–50, 55; of movement, 109. See
neuroreductionism, 19–22 also contrast
neurotypical, 3, 6–12, 16–17, 19, 21, perception, vii, 6–7, 9–10, 12, 23–25,
153n1, 155n9, 156n14, 156n15. See 28, 30, 50–51, 60, 62, 65, 80,
also autism 154n7, 155n12; autistic, 6–7,
new media art, 85–87, 110, 162n5. See 155n9, 155n10; enactive, 19,
also interactive art 38, 159n9; and field, 66; and
Nietzsche, Friedrich: on forgetting, imperceptible, 40, 66, 72, 76, 78;
129–30 nonsensuous, 51, 160n14; and
nonconscious, 158n21 tendency, 68; and texture, 4;
nonhuman, 6, 13; more-than, 4, 66 visual, 20
non-I, 63, 66, 72 perceptual pole/percept, 14–15, 19–22,
nonsensuous: perception, 51, 160n14; 157n19. See also object; physical
similarity, 37, 41, 50–51, 56; and pole
transparency, 79 performative, 98, 107, 119, 141–42,
notional, 42, 57, 69; and force, 41; 146
In d e x
184
Perrault, Pierre: on intercessors, 64 practice, vii–ix, 86, 89–91, 95, 101,
person, 6, 24–26; organism that per- 111; collective, 108; creative, 88,
sons, 28–29 94; ecology of, 28; of event-
perspective: of the universe, 26, design, 92; experimental, 89. See
28–30 also techniques
phenomenology, 19–20, 157n18 preacceleration, 28
philosophical: discourse, 114; inquiry, prearticulation, 165n40
90; practice, 94; problem, 98; prehension, 23–24, 26, 28–29, 154n7.
process, 157n18 See also affect
philosophy, vii–ix, 20–21, 64, 91, 95– preoperation, 28–29
98, 126, 139, 143, 151 presence, 6–7
photography, 72, 160n2 present, 46–47, 49, 118, 129; co-
physical, 39; and the brain, 21; pole, present, 5; more-than-, 116;
14–15, 19–22, 157n19. See also specious, 56–57. See also time
perceptual pole/percept presentational immediacy, 155n12,
platform for relation, 101–4, 116, 128, 155n13, 158n21. See also causal
135–37, 142–43. See also relation efficacy; entertainment;
play, 22, 47, 49, 85, 89, 99–100, 106, perception
116, 118, 129, 132, 141, 143; of priming, 93, 98–100, 112, 114, 141;
color, 5; of light, 59–60 affective, 20
point-field, 35–36, 39 process, 24, 26, 46, 54, 62, 64–66, 68,
political, 86, 108, 120, 156n14, 72, 77–78, 90, 92–94, 97, 102, 104–
156n15; and aesthetic, 72, 106, 5, 108, 114, 120, 123–26, 131–32,
110, 120, 126–27, 132, 146, 151; 136–37, 143, 147, 156n14; of art,
bio-, 100; and economy, 105, 88; capitalist, 121–22; of capture,
163n15; rhetoric, 22 123; choreographic, 160n17; of
politics: preemptive, 129 cooperation, 122; creative, 102,
polyrhythm, 118–20, 122–24, 126–29. 139; emergent, 93; forms of,
See also harmony; rhythm 154n7, 157n21; generative, 107;
position, 16–17, 25, 35–37, 39–42, 44, and immanent critique, 87; of
72. See also any-point individuation, 122; of painting,
potential, 13, 26, 28–29, 35, 41, 44, 59–60, 62–63, 72, 74, 78–80;
54, 87, 90–91, 101–4, 115, 125, 131– philosophy, 157n18, 157n20; and
32, 151, 154n7, 159n13; collective, research-creation, 88–89, 124,
142; creative, 103; expression, 139; self-organizing, 109, 112;
119; field of, 24–25; and move- shared, 129; and technique, 89; of
ment, 41; relations, 114; for self- thinking, 90
organization, 122 Prohm, Alan, 143
potlatch, 127–30, 150, 165n43, proposition, viii, 50, 54, 56, 96, 106,
166n44; (im)material, 95 136–37, 142–43, 145–47, 150–51;
power, 138; of becoming, 122; of radical empirical, 115
decision, 104; of the false, 68; proprioception, 48, 143, 160n17
generative, 117; to rebegin, 79 Proust, Marcel, 48, 49, 54
In d e x
185
Quartier des Spectacles (Montreal), 132; field of, 14, 74; and vibration,
86–87, 111, 163n8, 163n9 63, 66
quasi-chaos. See chaos: quasi- rhythm: ix, 4, 31–34, 36–38, 40, 43–
44, 49–51, 62, 72, 115, 118–19, 126,
Rancière, Jacques, 112 128, 156n14, 156n15, 159n3; and
reflection,17; and consciousness, 19– milieu, 45, 49, 54; of process, 26
20, 157n16, 157n19 Rubin, Sue, 156n15
relation, 4, 6–7, 9–12, 15, 21, 30, 37,
42, 50, 52, 60, 66, 68, 78–79, 93, SATosphere (Society for Arts and
119–20, 123, 126, 128, 132, 142, Technology, Montreal), 111, 135–
161n7; and any-point, 50; causal, 37, 166n1
155n12; cognitive, 15; creative, Savarese, DJ, 156n15; on freedom, 22
105, 123, 150; diagrammatic, Savarese, Ralph: on aroundness,
143; and diplomacy, 165n32; 154n4; on autism, 156n15
economy of, 127; emergence, Savoie, Monique, 110–11
103; and emphasis, 18; field of, Schumpteter, Joseph: on capitalism,
64, 122, 125–31, 136, 165n41; and 130
field-effects, 21; force, 115; forms self-enjoyment, 13
of, 123; human, 66; interaction sensation, 6, 36, 39–42, 133, 160n17.
versus, 164n22; and interval, 52, See also thinking-feeling
69; life, 122; modalities of, 18; and sense, 23–24, 29. See also perception;
movement, 43, 52, 54, 164n20; of thinking-feeling
non-relation, 159n12; potential, SenseLab (Montreal), 90, 92, 103–7,
114; and qualitative, 22; self-, 62; 110–12, 120, 123, 135, 137–43, 145–
spaces of, 101; and the whole, 48, 151, 164n17, 164n18, 167n6
63. See also platform for relation; sensorimotor, 38–40, 43, 46–48, 54,
techniques of relation 159n9, 160n14
relational soup, 107–8 Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine, 38; on
representation, 50, 55, 65, 68–69, 147; corporeal-kinetic forms, 45; on
more-than of, 69 embodiment, 159n11; on the
research, 84, 88, 90, 161n2; inter- motional-relational, 159n14; on
disciplinary, 84; social science the sensorimotor, 159n9; and
model, 162n5, 162n7; theoretical, superposition, 159n14
88–89. See also research-creation; sight, 39, 43–44, 46–47, 64–65, 68–69,
theory-practice divide 72, 88; feeling and, 48, 68–69. See
research-creation, 84–92, 105–6, also gaze
112, 114–15, 120–21, 124, 127, similarity, 50–51, 65; nonsensous, 37,
130, 132, 162n3, 162n5, 163n14, 41, 50–51, 56
163n15, 164n17; events, 90–91; Simondon, Gilbert, 8, 89
field of, 151; as process, 88–89, simple location. See location: simple
124, 139 simultaneous contrast, 26, 158n3
resonance, 29, 68–69, 74, 79, 110, 114– Sinclair, Jim, 156n15; on autism, 6
15, 118, 123–24, 127, 132; aesthetic, singularity, 15, 39, 92, 108, 118, 122;
In d e x
18 6
of the event, 109, 120; of expres- surface, 18, 119–20, 122, 143, 160n17
sion, 130; of movement, 38–39 syllogism, 38, 159n10
singularization, 165n41
singular point, 35; and tendency, 115 taking account, 5, 23–24, 28, 154n7,
skin: and proprioception, 160n17 155n12
smell, 4–5, 7–8, 12 taking place, 25–29
sobriety, 99, 164n25 technicity, 94, 101–2, 112, 114–15
Social Sciences and Humanities techniques, vii–ix, 31, 35, 40, 47, 49,
Research Council of Canada 89, 91–95, 99–101, 105–8, 111–12,
(SSHRC), 162n3, 164n21 116, 129, 140–41, 143, 150; and
Society for Arts and Technology creative practice, 88, 94; of exper-
(SAT), 86–87, 92, 103, 110–12, imentation, 103; of hospitality,
116–17, 133, 135–37, 146, 162n5, 128; for movement, 44, 46; self-
163n11, 163n14 organizing, 104. See also practice
Society of Molecules event (SenseLab), techniques of relation, 91–96, 101,
106–10, 165n31, 165n33 103–4, 107–8, 122, 129; capitalist,
Souriau, Etienne: on modes of exis- 121
tence, 8 Technologies of Lived Abstraction event
space, 32–35, 46, 48, 55, 62–63, 66, series (SenseLab), 91, 110, 123, 143
77–80, 98–100, 112, 115, 132–33, tendency, 11, 13–14, 16–17, 19–20, 22,
space (continued) 28, 37, 44, 56, 64–65, 68–69, 77,
143; any-space-whatever, 28; derelict, 84–85, 88, 96–99, 101, 114–17, 119,
106, 109; event-space, 117; of the 122–23, 128–29, 138–41, 143, 146–
gallery, 110–11; of relation, 101 47; to expression, 5, immanent,
space-time, 48, 114, 126, 128 123; interdisciplinary, 88; minor,
speculative pragmatism, 89–90, 137 99
spiritual, 60, 63, 65, 79–80, 160n3 terminus, 97, 131, 155n8, 164n24
Stengers, Isabelle, 90, 166n2 texture, 4; and movement, 10
Stern, Daniel, 118 theory-practice divide, 84–85,
Stern, Nathaniel, 143 112, 153n15. See also research;
St. John the Baptist (da Vinci), 63, 65, research-creation
69–70, 74 thinking-feeling, vii, 41–42, 51–52,
subject, 6, 8–9, 14, 19–20, 24–25, 63–66, 68–69, 79–80, 160n17. See
66, 128, 130, 161n11; human, 7. also movement-moving
See also non-I; organism-that- thisness, 29, 114, 119
persons; person thought, vii–ix, 10, 38–39, 42–43, 65–
subjective form, 14, 29 66, 68–69, 80, 105, 116, 130–31; in
subtraction, 9, 12, 18, 20–21, 39. See the act, vii–viii, 89; and the body,
also more-than; multiplicity 45; choreographic, viii; collective,
superposition, 37, 40, 42, 45–47, 50, 90, 97; forces of, 63, 69; modes
156n14, 159n14. See also fusion; of, 22, 90; and movement, 41,
zone of indistinction 45, 65, 91, 101; and techniques,
In d e x
187
88; velocity of, 33–34. See also 159n12, 160n19; double, 46–47;
thinking-feeling field of, 36, 77; peripheral, 10
threshold, 11, 16, 63–66, 98–100, visionary, 45, 47–51, 54–55;
124–29, 131–32, 135–36, 141–42, moment,56
146–47; of an alter-economy, 150;
of conscious awareness, 38; of Water Lily Pond (Monet), 63, 68, 70
death, 56; of expressibility, 6. See what-if, 41, 43–45, 48–51, 56, 115. See
also limit also as-if; if-then
time, 10, 12–13, 16, 46, 49–50, 55, 63, white, 60, 62, 68–29, 76–80, 161n7,
65, 79, 80, 115, 129–31; dissonant, 161n10. See also light
57; taking-, 68; time-loop, 45; Whitehead, Alfred North, 13, 19,
time-shift, 44, 50. See also past; 96, 166n2; on assemblage, 116;
present on causal efficacy, 155n12; on
touch, 49–50, 52, 54–56, 64, 160n17, cognition, 15–16; on elimination,
160n19 158n21; on the environment, 7,
traces, 40–44, 47–48, 54, 65–66, 78, 28; on existence, 3, 28; on expres-
80, 108, 117, 159n13; trace-forms, sion, 30; on feeling, 29; on impor-
60, 62–63, 76, 80 tance, 29–30; on life, 26; on light,
transduction, 37, 42, 63, 137, 139, 79; on matter of fact, 29; on multi-
142–43, 148, 159n7; questions, 139 plicity, 3, 7; on objects, 154n7; on
transparency, 34, 77–80, 161n7. See person, 26; and physical and men-
also light tal poles, 157n19, 160n15; on pre-
transversal, 140–41; force, 151; limit, 49 sentational immediacy, 155n12;
truth: pragmatic theory of, 155n8 on the realm of forms, 155n7; on
Tubular Loom, The (Prohm/SenseLab), taking account, 154n7
143, 145–46, 148 Whole in the Head (Forsythe), 43–44,
158n1
universe: perspective of, 26, 28–30 Willems, Thom, 32, 51, 54–55, 57; on
User’s Guide to (Demanding) the Impos- Forsythe, 43
sible, A, 150 Woolf, Virginia, 31, 45–46, 49, 159n2;
use-value, 8, 14–15; of habit, 21 and the as-if, 49; and the middle,
33
value, 86–87, 89, 110, 114, 120–23, Woolf Phrase (Forsythe), 31–58, 158n1,
130–33, 165n41; academic, 84; 158n2, 159n4, 160n19
prestige, 121, 131; use-, 8, 14–15 world/worlding, vii, 4, 13–14, 21–22,
vibration, 62–66, 74, 76, 78–79, 127; 26, 28–30, 45, 46, 74, 109–10,
and intensity, 30, 62, 69; and 156n15; neurotypical, 153n1
light, 68–69; and resonance, 63, writing, vii–ix
66
virtual, 65, 80, 91, 107, 132; light,
78–79 zone of indistinction, 41, 156n14, 159n14.
vision, 37, 39, 41, 46–48, 68, 79, 133,
See also fusion; superpositionErin
In d e x
Manning is the university research chair in Relational Art and Philosophy in the
Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. She is also the di-
rector of SenseLab. She is the author of Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance,
Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy, Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty
(Minnesota, 2007), and Ephemeral Territories: Representing Nation, Home and Identity
in Canada (Minnesota, 2003).
Brian Massumi is a professor of communication studies at the University of

Montreal. He is the author of Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occur-
rent Arts, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, A User’s Guide to Capital-
ism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari, and (with Kenneth Dean)
First and Last Emperors: The Absolute State and the Body of the Despot. He is the editor
of The Politics of Everyday Fear (Minnesota, 1993) and A Shock to Thought: Expression
after Deleuze and Guattari. His translations from the French include Gilles Deleuze
and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (Minnesota, 1987).

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Thought in the Act

Thought in the Act

Erin Manning and Brian Massumi

University of Minnesota Press

Chapter 1 was previously published as “Coming Alive in a World of Texture: For

Copyright 2014 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

Published by the University of Minnesota Press

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper

The University of Minnesota is an equal-­opportunity educator and employer.

Coming Alive in a World of Texture: For Neurodiversity

A Perspective of the Universe:

Just Like That. William Forsythe:

No Title Yet. Bracha Ettinger: Moved by Light

Part II. Propositions

For Thought in the Act

Postscript to Generating the Impossible

Philosophy is [. . .] a practice of concepts [that] must be judged

This book runs writing interference. It seeks to compose concepts, of a cer-

The notion of existence involves the notion of an environment

More and Less (Multiplicity)

have mindblindness, Baron-­Cohen suggests, is to lack empathy. It is to be

toward an experience in the making. Colored shadow has emerged: a qual-

with Mother, or someone who can understand my voice now, whether

of perception, emphasizing how experience unfolds through the matrix

Fielding and Affordance

environment that dynamically appears in a jointness of experience. This

predefined objects nor overshadowing subjects have yet to be singled out;

Ebb and Flow

the entertainment of the environment with an immediate availing

When the Field Dances

Mukhopadhyay is in the thick of a number field of experience. Just as color,

that 2 + 4 could offer. I developed a very powerful 2 + 4 system, which

The Gateway Called Moment

In a pen? “Here I am! Here I am!” screams Mukhopadhyay’s pen. I am in

yet another variation, in addition to environmental awareness and cogni-

It is no doubt easier to habitually cross into a room that itself habitually

which is itself predicated on the subtractive emergence of cognition from

of these active ingredients to the total field falls out. It is designed-­out by

the extent to which the composing of experience can be reduced to its

The great United States of America is breathtakingly not free.

What we have endeavored to help draft, co-­composing with writers like

Alfred North Whitehead

Agency and Patience

Beyond Simple Location

Potential Is the Stream

Rhythm, History, Life

A Perspective of the Universe

place. It tells of intense experience nested in the larger penumbral region

in the milieu of the between, an architectural surround is a conjoint trans-

In 2001, the Forsythe Company created Woolf Phrase,1 a piece conceived

At word’s end, suspended by the rising sound surround in the midair of

Woolf’s in the Middle

piece’s occurring. Somehow, collectively beginning, collecting difference.

The Any-­Point of Movement

activation contour6—­with a significant difference. Native to the visual system

To the extent that it unfolds from a recognition according to a logic,

there is a contracting of the habit. Every adaptive unfolding comes from an

sequential forms. The form of the movement cannot be reduced to the

Language and movement meet in the thinking-­feeling. In thinking-­

capacity to speculate. What-­if is the “body becomes an organism for lis-

The Notional in the Motional

or even to follow a movement, but to continue it by other means. Acti-

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

have mindblindness, Baron-Cohen suggests, is to lack empathy. It is to be

of these active ingredients to the total field falls out. It is designed-out by

What we have endeavored to help draft, co-composing with writers like

The Any-Point of Movement

activation contour6—with a significant difference. Native to the visual system

Language and movement meet in the thinking-feeling. In thinking-

capacity to speculate. What-if is the “body becomes an organism for lis-

rhythmic milieu. What-if: a curve is thrown that cannot be predicted in its

“Good-Bye Condos, Hello Technological Arts”

not only as part of a practice of event-design, but as part of a larger “eth-

involved, and as a consequence are low on follow-on effects. Effects cannot

1 A ban was set in place as regards presenting already-completed

a small-group session had to be activated in capsule form for the group

central-instrument / ambient sound feedback loop. The volume was kept

collectivity’s coming-together and sets a priori boundaries to that conver-

Standard forms for the sharing of work—conference, artist’s talk, demo,

main challenges of the participants’ self-organizing over the two phases

global effect of their coming-together. Their diversity disappears into

quasi-chaos of tending-toward-meaning from which this conversation—

politico-aesthetic economies of relation

quasi-chaotic conditions nudging harmony toward polyrhythm. The

economy happens when exchange-as-attunement loses its desirability.

Good-Bye Technological Arts, Hello Trees

A second level of organization was set up to cut across the affinity-

The gift-giving ceremony was based on a well-known game.4 All of the