Decentring, questioning, and queering the givens of ‘the self’ – the critical, creative body

Breaking Free is an online, collaborative dance symposium involving members and associates of Café Reason Butoh Dance Theatre and a DPhil researcher from the University. Butoh, an expressionist dance form originating in 1950s Japan, involves ‘the formation of a question inside the body’. As a dancer tries to answer it, the question becomes deeper and more complicated, leading to more dancing, questioning, and searching. It is a useful medium to interrogate many of the questions faced by the humanities, including how we perceive and relate to our bodies.

Running over the course of several months, the artists collaborating on this project will be eliciting, producing, and discussing their responses to four different themes.

  1. The Gendered Body– what is the impact of societal constructions of sex and gender upon one’s sense of self? How does the performance of genders become complicated as you dance it?
  2. The Impeded Body – what are the obstacles dancers might face in being able to perform? What if their body does not or can not behave as they want it to?
  3. The Aesthetic Body – how do our internalised notions of societal beauty shape how we see our bodies when we dance? How can we break out of the obsession with needing to ‘look like’ a dancer to create meaningful work? Can dancers makes dances that are not beautiful?
  4. The Isolated Body – in response to COVID-19, this session will address the impact that the pandemic has had upon our movements – as dancers and in daily life. Do we move differently now? Have we been affected by dance starvation, or by moving in spaces too big or too small for us?

From the creative responses to each theme we will produce a video-collage performance that will be available to view online.

This initial online performance is intended to be starting points towards a larger-scale project at a later date.


I find theory provides useful conceptual tools for disrupting, or ‘queering’ ingrained normative understandings of our bodies and movements. Ways to cultivate the capacity to reimagine and re-move our bodies and their relation to others, to stitch together contingent, unlikely creations and collaborations without worrying overly about convention – or simply resisting it at times. All of this with the hope of healing ruined and abandoned parts of ourselves and gestating what might be different possibilities of becoming with others: including non-humans and a damaged planet.

So, as invitations to actively recast our shifting understanding of the limitations of our dancing bodies I offer a few theoretical perspectives from three theorists close to my heart. Kindred spirits, who enlarge the terrain of my thinking, working and playing and whom I trust to accept the liberties I take with their ideas.

Michel Foucault

Foucault allows us to see we are not the independent rational beings modernity continues to teach us we are. He seeks to break with the ontological safeguard of dualism between subject and object that supports the belief objective knowledge about the world is possible using individual action and agency. Somewhat akin to the Bristol protesters who recently toppled the statue of the slave trader Edward Colston from its pedestal during Black Lives Matter demonstrations, Foucault seeks to topple the modernist myth of the powerful, centred, Western (white, male) subject, celebrated for his achievements and knowledge, whose authority legitimates his ruling over the ‘less powerful’.

To reverse and disperse such assumptions about power and the subject Foucault challenges the commonsense understanding of power as oppressive and/or something that people do or do not possess. Instead, he sees it as constant, unintentional productive relations between constraint and resistance which never sediment or settle into firm, stable origins. His goal in rethinking power thus is not to deny the power imbalances that exist in society, but to analyse these beyond the binary of oppression-emancipation, and to stop us confusing power with greatness. His fresh starting point assumptions for analysis of our present, embodied histories can be summarised thus:

  • There are no universal or transcendental concepts of reason, subjectivity, history, truth or progress;
  • Knowledge and the subject are to be analysed as the contingent effect of discursive formations embedded in institutional practices and productive power relations;
  • Discursive formations are rule-governed systems for the production of thought and subjects, composed of a multiplicity of shifting discontinuous, mutating dispersions.

To get a handle on these ideas in an embodied way I suggest an exercise.

First, stop any movement to simply be still. Feel in your body the ways you have trained and disciplined yourself to sit or stand in certain ways. Do you have a particularly straight back with shoulders straining to hold it so? Is there automaticity in holding your legs crossed when on a seat? Is there a pushing forward of the chest to affirm your presence? Are you holding your vagina tightly or pulling in your anus? What are your hands doing? Take the time to feel and say hello to your particular practices of holding and governing your body. Then think about what part they play in your understanding of yourself as a legitimate, worthy subject, and where the prompts and injunctions to hold your body in this way come from. Is it from the institutions of family, education, or religion? Is it from your own personal story of responding to dominant narratives in media, art, law and dance? Is it from an imagined invisible gaze of others that you have internalised and have forgotten is there? When thinking about all of this, remember your thoughts and perceptions are contingent upon the moment, not fixed truths.

The aim of this reflective exercise is for us to begin to understand our selves and bodies as an effect and vehicle of power which do not exist in a one-way harmonious and fixed relation with the world but exist as emergent, heterogeneous, multiple actions and movements called into being by social norms. Relating this to the ‘Breaking Free’ in the title of this project, Foucault would reject the idea of a final, once-and-for-all ‘breaking free’ since he locates the possibility of freedom in the perpetual imbalance between consent and resistance to such norms in the micro practices of our everyday lives and bodies (N.B. see my video where I embody the constant oscillation between consent and resistance in a yes-no monologue). Norms such as those relating to gender, age, physical ability, appearance, aesthetics and contact with others. So, as a personal example, if trapped in a perception of myself as old and ugly I can stay with the knowledge that a) there are no absolute truths about beauty or age, b) I am thinking this as a response to normative ideologies and representations in society, and c) I can topple my way out of this illusory fixed idea towards movement and change.

To extend his examination of how power operates in modern society Foucault provides concepts that explain how as human subjects we are governed and self-discipline in ways that ensure our understanding of ourselves comes to be coextensive with the life of society – if we are to be legitimate subjects. Three of these are the a) disciplinary power, b) ‘care of the self’ and c) the ‘art of critique’.

To construe disciplinary power, in his book Discipline and Punish Foucault uses Jeremy Bentham’s concept of the Panopticon, an architectural prison blueprint where guards inhabit a central tower and maintain surveillance over all inmates. This technology does far more than structure the building since it triggers in inmates the condition of feeling constantly visible that ensures the automatic functioning of power (think back to the imagined, invisible and internalised gaze suggested in the reflective exercise above). Unlike brute power or sovereign power over subjects, which links back to individuals, for Foucault disciplinary power can be conceptualised as ‘a faceless gaze … thousands of eyes posted everywhere’ (Foucault 1975: 164) that works on the docile bodies and souls of inmates in such a manner that they willingly become productive, useful and effective. Expanding this notion beyond the prison Foucault argues disciplinary power regulates bodies in subtle, efficient ways in other institutional contexts such as schools, hospitals, factories and corporations.

Stop now for a moment to contemplate your own entanglement with the infinite web of dynamic and situational panoptic techniques. In what ways have you been disciplined and subjugated to be a certain type of person and social body in reciprocal relations with others? Perhaps draw a mind map of all of these. Then take this further and ask yourself, what speaks when you speak to others? What dances when you dance? Is it an ‘I’? Is it a ‘we’? What are the institutional histories of subjection that place you as the owner of those words and movements?

If you are beginning to feel there needs to be more room for practices of freedom in all of this, fear not, so did Foucault, hence his interrelated notions of ‘care of the self’ and the ‘art of critique’. Whereas the former is the reflexive potential to perform indeterminate practices of freedom in self-formation that Foucault equates with ethical practice, the latter is construed as the virtuous practice of being governed a bit less. There is no escaping governance but there is leverage for change. Eschewing notions of fixed moral codes, for Foucault ethics are to be understood as a creative force producing possible openings for change generating both normative and transformative actions within different disciplinary modes of subjectivation – the latter to be understood as simultaneous control and compliance to disciplinary technologies. Thus it is through on-going self-awareness and reflexivity that shifting moments of ‘breaking free’ are to be found in the disorderliness of power relations. Furthermore, it is such micro ethical practices in pursuing resistant (and compliant) action that allow us to forge our lives into a form of art aka Foucault.

To summarise - to reproduce society and knowledge power needs our bodies, souls, imitation, repetition, compliance and resistance. Our constitution as subjects by subjectivation is the prerequisite of our agency. Does this strategy of ceaseless creative and critical practice sound like the birthing moan of art and life to you?

Judith Butler

Taking many of Foucault’s notions as fertile ground for her own thinking, in particular, the construal of the subject as a political problematic, Butler’s aim is to unground any fixed, descriptive and exclusionary categories of gender identity imbricated with heteronormative workings of power. As a first step in this direction Butler critiques the feminist movement requirement of solidarity, which assumes a normalising, solid ground to identity that fosters a ‘them and us’ attitude. However, rather then rejecting the dissension over the meaning of the term ‘feminist’ between different factions, Butler argues these should be reclaimed or resignified as the ‘ungrounded ground’ as opposed to the ground of feminist theory (Butler 1995: 50).

Resignifying within the matrix of power that constitutes us is central to Butler’s thinking, and is ‘a permanent possibility … one which gets detoured and stalled through other mechanisms of power, but which is power’s own possibility of being reworked’ (Butler 1995: 47). As such, it is a sharp-edged way to question domesticated givens and to ‘break free’ from within the discursive limits of ‘sex’. The point is not to take on new identifications that dubiously foreground gender as a site of political engagement, over and above race, class, geopolitical location or other – as Butler contends about feminist theory. Rather, since ‘what women signify has been taken for granted for too long’ (Butler 1995: 50) - to the extent the normalised notion has been confused with the actual subject - it is time to mobilise the terms ‘women’ or ‘feminine’ towards alternative production. In other words, ‘to continue to use them, to repeat them, to repeat them subversively, and to displace them from the contexts in which they have been used as instruments of oppressive power’ (Butler 1995: 51).

To study how the normative terms ‘woman’ or ‘feminine’ hold you in thrall, and try to give them new worth from within, begin by playing with ways of moving that evoke archetypal and stereotypical positioning and movements of these fixed notions. Are you being conventionally seductive? Hysterical? Cowering? Walking proud and beautiful (with a straight back)? Playing with a doll? Sweeping and dusting? Giving birth? Are you performing these for the male of for the female gaze. Repeat and reiterate these movements, trace the type of social identity implicated in these, what type of relations with others they implicate, and the type of communities they might (re)produce. Then begin to think about the type of relations, social identity and possible communities they exclude. What images and ideas come into your mind? Use these to generate quirkier, thicker, irreducible, unsuitable stories, ones which have space for the normative notion but which are not about the woman-making mechanics of history. When doing so, bear in mind that the effects of all actions are incalculable and cannot be planned in advance.

This exercise in repetition essentially depicts Butler’s theoretical concept of ‘performativity’, that is ‘the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects it names’ (Butler 1993: 2). (N.B. As you can see, there is a close link between Butler’s performatives and Foucualt’s understanding of discursive production via power relations.) However, as you also experienced, the process can be turned against itself to beget re-articulations and alternative modalities of power at odds with hegemonic regulations. This is never an innocent or transcendent contestation but a tough, complex effort to fashion a future from inevitably contaminated resources.

Donna Haraway

Like an unscrupulous magpie stealing from other birds nests, I lovingly filch three concepts to loiter and linger with from her book Staying with the Trouble. I attempt no synthesis, merely describe and share: yours to make of what you will.

First, Chthulucene, which defines the age in which we are living and hence provides an overarching context for rethinking the limitations of our dancing bodies and souls. The Chthulucene is ‘a timeplace for learning to stay with the trouble … on a damaged earth … full of inheritances, of remembering … of nurturing what might still be’ (Haraway 2016:2). Those inhabiting this timeplace are ‘beings of this earth, both ancient and up-to-the-minute … replete with tentacles, feelers, digits, cords, whiptails, spider legs, and very unruly hair’ (ibid.).

Second, ‘response-ability’. A concept I shall let you interpret for yourselves, conjugate as you will, since it speaks for itself to us all.

Third, ‘sympoiesis’. A simple term that means ‘making with’, creating with. There to remind us we are never alone as earthlings, but always ‘worlding with - in company’ (Harawy 2016: 58) of other critters or humus (the term Haraway uses to replace humans).

 

References

Butler, J. (1993) Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York; London: Routledge

Butler, J. (1995) Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of “Postmodernism”. In: Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange. New York; London: Routledge. Chapter 2, pp.35-58

Foucault, M. (1975) Discipline and Punish. London: Penguin Books Ltd.

Haraway, D. (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham and London: Duke University Press

 

Also see the website for this project, part of the TORCH Humanities Cultural Programme.

 

forearma dn arm come in from the right, pointing and touching a glass window which mirrors them slightly. Glare from behind makesdetails in window blurry