phrixos: 1/6/11

"A hole in the ground" : Komotini, Greece 2011

“[…] The tarantella is a strange dance that magically cures or exorcises the supposed victims of a tarantula bite. But when the victim does this dance, can he or she be said to be imitating the spider, to be identifying with it, even in an identification though an “archetypal” or “agonistic” struggle? No, because the victim, the patient, the person who is sick, becomes a dancing spider only to the extent that the spider itself is supposed to become a pure silhouette, pure color and pure sound to which the person dances. One does not imitate; one constitutes a block of becoming.[…]” [1]

Every becoming is double becoming, as far two entities collide into a new plane of being: at the same time I become Other, Other became Me, a simbiosis is generated. I will try to focus on some aspects concerned on what happens to the Other becaming Me, to imagine the life within Otherness and it’s coming to being.
Thus this is not always symmetrical, as far that in a ritual of “becoming animal” we somehow continue to have the morphogenic characteristics of a human being, two hands, two feets a head and so on. In a photography will surely not able to distinguish a human becoming tarantula , if not reading the footnote , as a different state of being than a human dancing or washing his car. Still the tarantella dancer is not swinging across buildings like Spider-Man nor his bite has become a deadly venom. In popular culture, especially in the comic-books representation, the characters often display also bodily transformations, mutant organs new abilities, all fitted in with all kinds of scientific fantasies like radiations generating mutations, telepathy induced levitation an so on. The display of otherness is often depicted with fancy colours that mimic otherness (like the Spider-Man suit that mimic a spider web).

Thinking in terms of making works-of-art around this animal-human boundaries, starting to understand, like always, how often such theme is repeating itself in the history of art, many times with a sense that the very meanings of art are modes of making real this transformations by means of expression. But then skepticism arises: is this a sort of religion, a metaphysical plane, a mumbo-jumbo? Were are the proofs of such transformations? If I build a nest like a mole does that makes me a hairy blind animal that burrows? And I will spend the rest of my life as a mole just thinking how to dig? Disappointed by the fact of not having generated a new skin, I’ve stumbled upon the work of a German biologist Baron Von Uexkull as introduced to me by the book of G. Agamben the “Open Man and Animal” and his commentary:

“[…] Too often, he affirms, we imagine that the relations a certain animal subject has to the things in its environment takes place in the same space and in the same time as those which bind us to the objects in our human world. This illusion rests on the belief in a single world in which all living beings are situated. Uexkull shows that such a unitary world does not exist, just as and a time that are equal for all living thing do no exist.
[…] There does not exist a forest as an objectively fixed environment: there exist a forest-for-the-park-ranger, a forest-for-the-hunter, a forest-for-the-botanist, a forest-for-the-wayfarer, a forest-for-the-nature-lover, a forest-for-the-carpenter, and finally a fable forest in which Little red Riding Hood loses her way.[…]”

As I understand it there is no way for me enter the space and time of an animal, for I’ll never have the bodily sensations or sensory organs to approach how a such place it could be. Trapped inside my human jail of having just two stereoscopical eyes and not the multiple eye of a fly. Many times as white-european kid I was watching television Nature Channel broadcasts that build fantasies of animality based on technological enhanced effects, like showing a sort of kaleidoscope that should simulate the sight of a fly. Yet they succeed two things, putting barriers to imagination and underlining the a possibility where a new cyber-self could by technology finally grasp the otherness.

But again this isn’t what I’ve sought: Eric Sprague "The Lizard-Man " (an artist that tattooed himself and performed surgery upon to become a lizard-like-skinned-man) is human all too human. These performers disclose trails that are not escaping to a open set of possibilities -yet. His claim of making his body a magnus opera is a realization of a “becoming artwork” , as is to say a worker becoming a fetish commodity. The body is for this artist his canvas and from that canvas he’s making a living, he marries having pets, and so on. What about the Lizard? What about this being Reptilian? Again reading his interview makes it clear, it wasn't his goal to resemble the Lizard, it's just a mediatic nick-name. So it fails becoming an animal and success into being in the territory of the Circus as a entertainer, producer of a fantasy where lions, lizard-men, jugglers and clowns appear.

A photograph suddenly reminds me of an aspect stressed by G. Deleuze and F. Guattari: 470 Taliban break out of prison of Kantahar through a hundred meters tunnel, to which each inmate had connected with a tunnel from is cell. A six month labour in secrecy was required for the making, it’s like a sort of collective artwork.
Is the passage from prison to freedom made by the becoming Mole of the prisoners? The passage from the inhuman jail assemblage to human freedom assemblage is deterritorialized by a practice of rodents. The connection be that “The Moles” affected the thoughts of the inmates in a way to make them to express their fantasies of escaping by becaming human-diggers, human-moles. Are the prisoners affected by Mole-ness
Therefore I could use some of these statements:

“[…] the first — A body must be defined by the ensemble of relations which compose it, or, what amounts to exactly the same thing, by its power of being affected.
the second – the simplest way in which i learn what happens to a body is through chance encounters: I walk in the street, I see Pierre who does not please me, it’s the function of the constitution of his body and his soul and the constitution of my body and my soul.
the third — As long as you don’t know what power a body has to be affected, as long as you learn like that, in chance encounters, you will not have the wise life, you will not have wisdom.
the fourth — There are two fundamental ideas of affection [affectus of the affectio]: sadness and joy. The idea of an effect which benefits or favors my own characteristic relation, and second, the idea of an effect which compromises or destroys my own characteristic relation
the fifth — Since there’s no single body which is not itself made up of several, one can say that there are common things or common notions in each body.
the sixth — When I am affected with sadness, my power of acting diminishes, which is to say that I am further separated from this power. When I am affected with joy, it increases, which is to say that I am less separated from this power. […]” [2]

Trapped in inhuman conditions their vigor is expressed in terms “of common things and common notions”, deterritorializing the becoming-prisoner imposed by the government.
Of course one can say, there is no proof or evidence that prisoners dream of becomings in such-a-way.
In this way of thinking it is the becoming something a trap for humans as a mean of expression
of animals ? The trapped human is an animal?

As A. Gell comments:

“[…]Moreover, if we look at other traps, we are able to see that each is not only a model of it’s creator, a subsidiary self in the form of an automaton, but each is also a model of its victim. This model may actually reflect the outward form of the victim, […] Or the trap may, more subtly and abstractly, represent parameters of the animal’s natural behavior, which are subverted in order to entrap it.[…] [3]

In this context we ride upon multiple definitions of humanity, which define boundaries and borders between what we perceive as a form of being (human) and by what criteria we should recognize it’s image. Redefining this question it is a complex and arrogant task ,as it seems that one should travel all the history of this definition only to find out that there is no universal answer to this kind of question, without linking together a system of cultural and political mechanisms that trigger many phenomena of our lives. A very “Anthropological machine” is set up to give outputs that restrain and tie together human beings into a form-of-life.

“[…]What distinguishes man from animal is language, but this no a natural given already inherent in the psychophysical structure of man; it is, rather a historical production which, as such, can be properly assigned neither to man nor to animal. If this element is taken away, the difference between man and animal vanishes, unless we imagine a nonspeaking man-Homo alalus, precisely- who would function as a bridge that passes from the animal to the human. But all evidence suggests that this is only a shadow cast by language, a presupposition of speaking man, by which we always obtain only an animalization of man (an animal-man, like Haeckel’s ape-man) or a humanization of the animal (a man-ape). […]”[4]

As if these are not enough, new findings suggest that the possibility of language is already an open border, animals that speak with the help of touch screen computers. The "experiments" in this field with primates have gone already beyond our scope: by generating a strange resemblance of a “literate” chimpanzee and the Ursonate of Kurt Schwitters. Apes trained by humans to recognize lexigrams and to connect them with their environment (the laboratory workers names, kinds of food for chimps, doors, items, actions), an example of this is this “PrimatePoetic” conversation that takes place in the laboratory between Lana the chimp and Tim the worker on the project:

Chimp Lana, when having to go through the same round of questions time after time, surprised her trainer Timothy Gill: "Please Tim move out of room". A sentence "Which was considered very remarkable because she was never trained to use 'out of' in such a context". Lana knew more than crude tests were designed to measure. In this conversation Lana asks the same Tim for a word she doesn't know.

Lana: ?Time give Lana this can.
Tim: Yes [He gives her an empty can.]
Lana: ?Time give Lana this can.
Tim:[replied he had no can, it was given to her]
Lana: ?Time give Lana this bowl.
Tim: Yes [He gives her an empty bowl.]
Lana: ?Shelly [Asking for somebody else.]
Tim: No Shelly.
Lana: ?Time give Lana this bowl.
Lana: [Erasing the previous sentence.]
Lana: ?Time give Lana name of-this.
Tim: Box name of this.
Lana: Yes.
Lana: ?Time give Lana this box.
Tim: [Gives the box and the conversation repeats with a new word, 'cup' .][5]

notes:

[1] Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari "A thousand Plateaus" transl. by Brian Massumi
[2] Anarchist Without Content "Embodiment"(http://anarchistwithoutcontent.wordpress.com/2011/04/11/embodiment/#more-694)
[3] Alfred Gell "Anthropology of Art: a reader" -Vogel's Net Traps as Artworks and Artworks as Traps
[4] Giorgio Agamben "The Open Man and Animal"
[5] Primate Poetic at "http://cryptoforest.blogspot.com/"

“Perhaps contemporary intellectuals experience anxiety in the face of the idea of radical change because we fear projecting only a repetition of our own sullied world under the guise of the new or because we cannot distinguish between the rhythms of change inherent in the system of late capitalism and changes that might actually displace the system by a new one altogether. Whatever the reasons, we remain—for the most part—stuck either celebrating the products of postmodern culture, thereby replicating the giddy rhythms of the postmodern ‘change’ itself; endlessly diagnosing the problem, thereby critiquing a system whose failures are by now well known; or enclosing genuinely new situations in past narratives or paradigms of understanding, thereby failing to understand uniqueness”

—Ellen E. Berry and Carol Siegel

source: http://www.rhizomes.net/issue5/poke/center.html

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