A play of distance

Can you run the line and run past it too? What is a line? A delimitation. It does not appear to be forward thinking but maybe it is. A marker that you trip past. A catch in the road that becomes your propellant. Maybe in the run of things you would land on your face. Some kind of catastrophe or defacement in any case. But it never gets resolved- the arrow never reaches the target- your face stuck to the ground is never even forwarded as an idea. Because each trip and the fly it provides- the shove from behind is certainly a jolt but it is collected mid point and mid point to that at a point between a point, then let go of again- a kind of hammering of stop start drill. So that the convulsions it throws up are actually you walking. You on a good day. Tumbling down the street, using the slight incline to your advantage, to get somewhere you have never completely arrived at. Throwing yourself past the line is an act of defiance, an ideation. Because there is nothing concrete that you are heading at.

So in that moment of suspension- a strange regurgitation of breath as the intake and the outtake get mixed up, do you really know where you are going? You swing round on the principle of your own forgetting- levering off the line, the foot-hold, the obstacle- some kind of surface of resistance and flying out, expansive after that intensification through the impact- the squashing of areas into one another and the bolt out of the blue. This is happening through out your body that modulates, shudders and re-distributes in the space surrounding.You are gliding like a bat sending out cries in the dark that bounce back at you off the walls so that the empty space begins to configure and differentials of loud/ soft, hard/soft, drive and release begin to thump against each other. So becomes the line. An interface.

It is a marker. A start in the composition of something. Something that you move through. Those momentary locks and openings create a kind of traction of affect- you swing along in and out of resistant niches. Some kind of curvature between the two that is impossible to describe because the bearings are always changing.You are the departed, the returned, gliding between those holds that swivel orientation and it is that which you are thinking through, that your body is forming through, squinting through, reconstituting through which is all it ever is and is and can be. Not the fully formed residue of a day out, a body in full view; shock of the stature but the actual workability of it that is not available up front.  Only that you know, you feel it in the way your body works, this grasp, release, this jamming and setting free, this working up of thresholds that are used for locomotion or for agitation in one place or in more than one.

You are thinking these thresholds as you are doing it but it is in that split second- actually half a second- where there is a glitch in control. A mismatch between something caught on to, collided with and the repelling out from that. That double move so loaded with positive and negative on the social scale could be an embrace when looped into an on-going moveability that is so on-going that it appears still.- backed on to itself. An embrace that is never recognised or called as such in the social ( as a bracketted animal) though the social is really a derivative- a kind of on-going tincture- of all these mutual and dissonant levels of activation. Of this unsettlement. There are these whirls and shapings that glide ever onwards as one area is affirmed, another erased, a swing from tree to tree. From touch to touch.

And it is the idea of the passage that really gets us going- not the individual moves broken down into anatomical compartments, oiled and limbered into contortions as a still life that are then meant to equate with the up and running version. Yes every possible trajectory of the arm raising the knee bending the hip swivelling have been practised and gone over. The pieces must equate a running body- a walking body. Nothing is missing in the jigsaw.Except the mis-match. The fault of lines. The glitch in getting from here to there where there is a black out- where the body is sent on, through the thought of it, the idea of it. The interest to see what becomes if it. This could be called play. The implications for learning are very strong for where this mis-match is effectively closed, the lines brought together in a harmonic clasp that is too fully choreographed, more and more bodies will find themselves thrust outside of that charmed procedure of recapitulation and their flaying attempts to re-institute some kind  of innovative delay will be taken as malfunction or in any case perverse.

Moving on. Moving is an ideation and ideas come from the open-ended nature of the workable lives in which this roaming attention exists that only in the glitches describes the value which is unlocatable- somewhere between one point and another. This is another way of saying that preemptive representation is not always a means to an end but an impossible opaqueness that attracts flight like moths to a light sticking them there so that it does away with all movement in the instantaneous burn-out affect that that carnivorous attraction involves. Trying to grasp everything all at once in one plane of integrity-filling the body up with light- with impossible visibility-substancing it at every turn with all that is seen to be missing. Adding compulsively all this stuff even as it drains away. More icing on the cake. Doing away with the pauses, the glitches, the minuscule half seconds that indeed do add up in the collectivity of an action filled with holes. Each hole is a fractional delay in which a skewed bearing is the thrust of the conscious into the unconscious, of the unconscious into the conscious. Of the multiple flexing of an intelligent multi-bodied and variable bodied system. Doing away with all that is doing away with the traction that keeps distant things at play. Those holes that individually do seem dispensable one by one as the clearing away of symptoms of lost time could be the jolt in time- the trigger for a thought-movement; the sand particle around which the crystal is growing*.

Perhaps autistic people in some of the more populist behavioural "cure" programs of targeted functionality where reward and discouragement try to shape actions as a hand shaping the maleable body, overload for that reason. Actions without ideas can't sustain themsleves. A question.
A problem. Create a problem- a stoppage; activate an action. The body will begin to envisage itself around those actions, thickening by degrees like a tongue licking away at toffee, coating itself. Acumulating.

There is always the play of differentials between where we are and where we might get to. It is never resolved because it is a juncture of slowness performed where many possibilities of direction, of response, of bounce, of absorption come up against one another and for that indiscernible of time measures create a lull, a cancellation, an incredible slowness right in the speed of it all. It is out of that  that actions find a course sustained by the novel idea of that stillness at the heart of an on-going life. A life that is lived differently at every instance- that calls for split second choices faster than we could arrange our limbs, decide on what is appropriate. In the pause, the glimmer, the stand-off out of which actions run. For we are weaving designs in the virtual space beyond our moves as delimited acts, beyond our bodies as sealed entities, beyond our thoughts as scripts of definite authority. These occur in an interaction- in a wider depository-a shifting field of influences that are occurring simultaneously and recalibrating the choices we appear to be making even as the act is being carried out. That is our inter-relating impossible to trace except where it runs out on itself. Our positionality in and through everything we touch- everything we pass through. Everything that re-aranges us.

Awareness is this tension of ends that do not stack up. So that a problem is being continuously posited and the affects out of which that problem hold are re-distributed in the looseness between falling and holding. Something that catches in differently each time through that jolt of uncertainty that is coupled through and through with the certainties we hold so close to us and that plays on and off of these. A constant dialogue, a constant interest- an activation re-performed with the material that comes to bear in order to further the pattern. Our lives- our communicability- and the worry and wonder that wrap around one another- that fold in and out of one another- to make thought patterns with trajectories of flight and return. This uncatchable value that bleeds into all of life out of the moment just before landing impossible to inhibit, to delimit. Because it is not of any single habitable location. Not in a body. In no known dwelling. Bodies no longer move without that. Indetermination cannot be deleted. It is crucially already the missing factor.

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This piece is written whilst being in the middle of reading Brian Massumis book, "Parables for the virtual"

 *This is a reference to Simondon's theory of Individuation where a problem or interuption in the running of something- whether organic or inorganic- is an excuse to recalibrate it within and out of that fault-line. That engagement in the midst of a problem of continuity is what furthers the uniqueness of a pattern as a spontaneous composition or becoming. It is upon that niche or fault-line that the recursiveness of an awareness takes hold.

Displacement of the centre of attention

20.3.2010 5.30pm



Best way to begin the question of feeling is to maybe look into the management of feeling states- so that they do not tip into overload-extinction. To look at how small displacements in the perceived and felt centre of gravity in the body can be made to work as an emerging pattern as a kind of shifting roaming re-allocation in a correlation to environmental encounters and as an ability to stay with that engagement. That begins to make a circulation system so that focus/attention does not build and build in one confined location and then explode but dissipates out of any one holding. These small shifts are a way to intuit the on-off pump of contact-release, movement-pause enacted through the physical body and its tactile sensibilities and taken into a kind of pressure valve of constriction-expansion that actually uses these same dynamic alignments yet uses the tension- release to hold in a frame of reference a perceptual-awareness as a felt experience whilst having already moved on to a different emphasis and point of comparison. So memory through a different kind of timing of attention and cut-out begins to work up into a pulsing order to create a spatial referencing system. Therefore multiple frames are popped open with none taking precedence so that they themselves begin to interact rather than consume attention. The conversation becomes multiple.

Working on this spatial perceptive field but actually feeling that as pressure-release in parts of the body becomes a way of organizing- i.e. displacing the centre from the head to the abdomen and then to the chest. Having the initial contact in any of these areas as a very condensed point of focus . Than releasing that and letting it dissipate across the chest to the throat, shoulders and ribs, or from the abdomen outwards across the flanks, or the head from the eyes to the ears and the back of the head. Then on into the extremities of limbs that are loose and spreading as the affect of this filtering system reaches them.

Perhaps these kinds of managements of states of affect through displacement and dissipation in the way one would experience touch as compression and spaciousness, can be internally engined as organs and muscle groupings press in on one another, than relax. That becomes a way of moving and of holding together- as if against the constriction of water that takes on the quality of a force. Using these states of self-induced constraint to move against is an exercise in consciousness and a means of staying for longer in the co-presence of others.

I’ve noticed that many autistic children have unusual patterns of holding and release with the breath, with food intake, excretion patterns. Also with stopping and starting movements, with sleep and wakefulness and with facial clenching and release of groups of muscles. Using physical interaction as a pacing practice this can be used for managing internally orchestrated rhythms of stop-start- engagement/letting go. It becomes a way for a child to notice the act of creating these devices of contrasting states of activation and relaxation and of widening the choices and possibilities of how they are played out and used so that rather than being played into critical extremes that resemble near death scenarios that become palpable in the extent of their discomfort, they are modulated and become a practice of synchronizing patterns into workable shapes and in so doing of utilizing affects.

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There are various other practices- BHUTO, WARAKU ( Both Japanese Practices) where states of possible trauma or overwhelming affect are re-distributed in cyclical and ritualistic physical practices. The states of mind they induce are a discipline of location and dislocation and as a way of staying in the positive and negative of a situation by following with interest the physical repercussions of those encounters. By letting the feeling state come and go and become an engageable point of physical impact and dissipation they play across the body as they might play across land.

26 Moves

*Note: This post relates to a twin blog wwwmovements.blogspot.com
also called 26 moves- of a series of drawings. Those in turn were activated by some of the work done in Daniel lepkoff's workshop in Frieburg, Physical Dialogues, between 31st July and 6th August 2010. ( The only way to get to the Movement blog is to click on the link in the blog roll).
R.
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Bodies placate into one another. The outline absorbs, thickens, bends, absolves through the repercussions of something that keeps coming. Keeps bending.

There is nothing there when you look because you are hopelessly drawn into it too. Line for line. Echo for echo.

But there is a hesitant blink between the thought of it and the reaching for it. The blot of there/not thereness that is a jolt, a scurry, a scribbling and a scribbling out.

It is too terrible to look at these up close against one another like bodies in a morgue. Better that they fade in and out of one another recalibrating so that the multitude works as one.

The placement and demarcation of units of attention. With the yawning gaps where the lines run out into a bend in the paper there is a channelling into and out of invisibility. The blank pieces are a gulf at the limit that does not exist so that we stagger, hesitate, draw back into some kind of tottering brink that takes our body over the edge whilst remaining it where it is.

A wobble both drawn into gravity and propelled into light. The movement keeps running and running and is simultaneously seized, encapsulated, condensed. Called into blood and bones, muscles and sinews that implodes in that snap-shot.The blink of a flash-gun. The fall-out, the picture.

This tear in our livability that allows us to consider an act. That teeters on the verge of being toxic. A break in the on-goingness like a gasp invading the chest. A sudden revolt of that which we would swallow down. This neutralisation of the grit of surface to surface propulsion that gives each action a direction is a question. It is also a problem or a physical condition. Now a gut explosion quite impossible to contain. Then an inability to let go. In both a recursing on the tried and tested insensitivity of digestion, of elimination. It is a gasp of contradictory affects- of stop/start. A halt into the melting mutability of this shaping as it is lost and found. Something is fixing it- imagining it- recording it. Holding it up. That something is us.

In fragments of stasis thrown out of range that are many moves in excess of something collectible we organise and disorganise. A torsion sewing through the body and between bodies and things. Beyond the demarcation of  lines.
The impact of surface to surface on one another. These are felt impressions that are lingering so that skid marks in our affability- in the traces we leave- in the blotting and patching of an impossible light are sent around the office, altered re-constituted. An inefficient time consuming filtering system that brings up more than it is worth and is seen to exist in the very heart of life. Kept on despite its near continuous lapses. For the reading takes its impetus, runs its course beyond the material impressions that we ponder over. It gives our movement back even as it is almost vanquished, turned to white in the bleach of absolute matches- of absolute reproduction, in the impossibility of this double encounter. Point for point it is eating itself.

Here but inconsistently fading. Flailing under examination. That is why every change of attention is a get-away car- a chance for a new life- an ability to remain alive for an extended amount of time.To remain conscious. Because in the constant light it is failing bit by bit under our eyes. Memories are erased, eroded from certain areas of ground that give way or embrace bodies repealing an event, disallowing the possibility of it ever completing- changing the nature of what it is as it becomes swollen with counter-indications.

It may appear lurching from here to there picked up on one radar or another. Reinventing itself like a rope uncoiling. It is hard to track. There are lines of  attraction and instances of revulsion scoring into one another and cross-hatching all of our interests, all of our senses. This is the only way to describe the body.

That kinetic buzz in the ears is muffled and cossetted in the here and now. Yet it expands beyond our bearings. Can we follow it? If we can only isolate a wish for even a fraction of a second.

It is doubtful.We cannot even read it in stillness. We sometimes leap into these bare bones of brokennness that are all that remains in order to cancel out the violence of the gesture itself- walk right through them like cob-webs that become our new glistening skin, layer upon layer. That is as far as anyone can take it in this backwash tide of trying to deal with what is there.

There's an accumulation of affectivities- of sensitivities -that score our bodies through and through. Yet our aggravation creates relevance like mimetic folds through which we make up on the spot expressions on our faces. A reachability far beyond touch yet that is bantered back and forth over the surfaces of our entire bodies into the felt vibrations of our organs in atunement with one another. There's a mutuality- a resonance so that even as we stand here quite unenthused amid gestures that are lingering beyond the execution of any single origin -a twitch, an unresolved falling, an unassociated laugh that comes over us in a flash- the push and a pull begins to build on something- to make something of it.

There's an on-going torsion that pulsates. We are sent this way and that way through filaments of attention that are cut out beyond the immediate impact of our senses; of our ability or wish to respond. This listless- even bored and distracted listening, keeps our attention in many places at once. Our unique listening skills onmany occasions save us from traffic we could never see.

These influences that are real qualities of leverage and vacuum rather than a wish list for affinity infiltrate slowly or rapidly because we stay around for long enough for that to happen. We absorb movements- a movabilty- before we even get around to knowing the moves. These become our value systems. Impossible to describe but activated and sent onwards by everything we touch or set eyes upon or even smell and that disturbs or compels certain mannerisms out of any fixture while bodily we remain where we are.

That is what staying in one place is about. (That is the release technique?) A tolerance for an affectivity that is not immediately absorbed into another or that calls impatiently- out of social, moral, functional obligations-for a stringent meaning or set of outcomes. It plays off of a resistance, a mis-match, a hesitant delay on the back of experience. There's an on-going taste for habits that have been procured and twisted endlessly and have increased our attention for discernment whilst not particularly having to do anything about it.

That may allow us to fidget in a public place. Play with our hair ends next to a stranger. Spit on the pavement and follow the course of that evolution from wetness to dryness. Twist an object in our hands or twist our bodies around that object.To turn towards and away from a distant figure one will never speak to coherently. To create a pattern that lives on somewhere between. That we care for without  knowing how or why. Without possessing because there is no way to return or to loop it back around into an obviously recurrent theme. Or even to close a gap equally from all sides as one does when closing a hand.