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Training for a Multiplicity of Self

This paper offers a cursory analysis of the research that I undertook last week at
the Thinking Dance Programme, which was a practice-led project co-hosted by
Leeds Metropolitan University and Yorkshire Dance. Whilst the overall aim was
to explore the concept of multiplicity of self I wish to focus specifically on a small
section of the work undertaken. This will be underpinned by the research that
continues to inform my PaR PhD.

PAUSE

This project came off of the back my last PaR performance called Talking about
Keith (2013), which explored potential making strategies for body based practice
focussed on the representation of multiple masculinities. When I use the term
multiple masculinities I am working from R W Connells understanding that there
are examples of masculinities that exist outside of the ideal cultural descriptors,
which very few people achieve. These masculinities are affected by other social
structures including class and family, as well as historical contexts however I
also argue that bodily experience of masculinity is also a factor to consider here.
As such it is safe to say that my own experience of masculinity is very different
from my fathers, and therefore masculinity is a multi-signifying sign (Connell,
2005).

What became evident through this PaR project was a type of training that I had
engaged with, which gave me a greater level of sensitivity to the multiple texts
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that help to construct my masculinity. I ended up collating some of these texts
and using them in my making process. After Talking about Keith (2013) I wanted
to know why this process had helped me to develop a greater sensitivity to my
body and why this developed multiple texts about my self. The aim of my project
in Thinking Dance was to unpack this training further and find ways of
articulating the process accurately to artists in other disciplines.

Whilst the results of my research have provided me with many answers, and
more questions, today I will be specifically analysing the first five minutes of the
training, which consisted of a warm-up that I had initially titled Get Bored. I
specifically want to focus on the terminology that I used for this section and how
it inhibited bodily experiences and the generation of multiple texts on self.

PAUSE

For an hour a day over five days, I explored and analysed, with three
participants, different versions of my training process, which focussed on the
bodys ability to reference multiple texts that came from the self, rather than
masculinity. I chose to work with three dance artists, two colleagues from Leeds
Metropolitan University and a graduate degree student from Hull College,
because despite never having any dance training, I felt it was important for me to
work within a dance context in order to have a greater understanding as to how
to talk about my body. Whilst I do feel like I have experienced some form of
embodiment during my PaR PhD these were fleeting moments. I also felt like I
was consistently pulling myself back into the mind where I used Lacanian
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terminology as a way of articulating the self. This generated a Cartesian
mind/body dualism.

As such I wanted individuals who were able to articulately explain how their
bodies were feeling in relation to the tasks given. I employed a reflexive
phenomenological inquiry to this study because it promotes a living body, one
that feels and is not subjected to becoming the object of empirical science. This is
because the body is inseparable from its environment and is always
communicating with it as such, through this communication the body resists
fixity, as one does ones body differently from another (Butler, 1998: 521).

There is though a difficulty in discussing the senses in performance, because
language forms the construction of those senses in the real world, so to describe
those senses is to reaffirm their own construction and frontality. Therefore, I felt
that specific strategies were needed to be employed in order to articulate and
reveal the phenomenological attitude outside of cognition. Rather than
traditional academic language, which aims at fixing thought structures and
positions, I hoped that the participants would be able to provide sloppier terms
to describe their experiences, ones that loosen scholarly language (Di
Bennedetto, 2007: 126). This language would be explored in the reflections at
the end of the session, and then analysed and reincorporated into the next class.

PAUSE

As I started to plan the week long programme a number of problems started to
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emerge. The memories that I had experienced over my own training period
were specifically memories of masculinity that also involved what Julia Kristeva
refers to as the abject. The abject is [w[hat does not respect borders, positions,
rules. [it is] the in-between, the ambiguous, the composite (Kristeva, 1982, 4).
Whilst in my practice abjection acted as metaphor for crossing the boundaries of
normative readings of masculinity, I felt that exploring the abject from the outset
was a lot to ask my three participants. I also wanted the conceptual elements of
my process to be played down and as such I did not want to engage in lengthy
conversations about representations of masculinity in female bodies. Instead I
wished to focus on the practicalities of the training.

As such, I decided that we would work towards the use of abject memories over
five days, starting with experiences of the present moment on Monday and
working towards memories and experiences of the abject on Friday. Each
session would consist of considerable shorter tasks than I had originally
undertaken, which were designed to keep participants focused on the concept of
self and the multiple texts that construct it, this latter point was in response to
Deleuze and Guattaris opening paragraph in A Thousand Plateaus. (1982): Since
each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd (1982. 3). A position,
which rejects an understanding of the singular, unified self, which is affected by
temporal, personal, historical and social conditions, and, which echoes my
understanding of Connells masculinity.

The programme was designed as close as possible to my own experiences in
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Talking about Keith (2014). As a warm up I asked the participants to become
bored, and to follow their intuitive instincts, without thinking them through. In
order to articulate this aim I employed a Freudian metaphor, the participant
should follow their impulses and bodily desires (the Id) without worrying about
trying to regulate those moments (The Super ego). They were then required to
enter into a process, which I temporarily called Sticky Noting. This involved
mapping all of the experiences, feelings, and memories that occur in that
moment, this became more complex as the week went on as the participants
were given a theme as a starting point. The point of this exercise was not to clear
the mind, instead of ejecting from your body the noise of cars passing, a memory
from last week, or the feeling of toes tingling, the idea was to place a
metaphorical sticky note onto that stimulus in order to collate it as a text and use
it later.

The next stage was to find an action that best represented, but did not attempt to
replicate, one of these texts. This would then be repeated over and over again in
the hope that this in turn generates a series of new texts about the self. These
tasks would be repeated twice more, and the actions joined to make one phrase
that when put together would demonstrate a multiplicity of self.

However, what became apparent over this process was that the language I used
was inhibiting the participants ability to generate and collect multiple texts.
This was most evident with the terms getting bored and sticky noting. After a
couple of days of repeating this process participants started to suggest that both
of these terms were problematic for them. The term getting bored required an
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emotional state that they didnt necessarily feel, certainly not at the beginning of
a research week, where all three participants were engaged with either their
own research or someone elses. Also, on observing the documentation it was
evident that the participants werent moving, they didnt seem to follow any
bodily patternings or desires, instead they seemed to sit and wait for the next
task. I considered then whether there was a relationship between the lack of
movement in the participants and the term that I had chosen to use.

When asked about alternative terms participant one identified that when
speaking about boredom I mentioned the activity of doodling when on the
phone. The term doodle had some resonance with them yet this term is not
without its problems, partly because it has changed widely depending on the
historical context of its usage. To doodle in the 18
th
Century for example meant
to be idle, or deviant. For millennia it has been a graphic depiction of thumb
twiddling. In the late 1940s it had resurgence in the magazine Punch, which
analysed the doodles of famous people, and in the late Middle Ages to doodle was
to also scribble. Although I would argue on this last point that scribbles are
rushed and made by an uncertain hands, whereas doodles are not restricted by
time, they are enjoyed, which is why very often doodles are repetitive (Battles,
2009, 107). As such, I was drawn to Matthew Battles exploration of doodles In
Praise of Doodling (2009), where he notes that:


Its joys are sensuous and immediate. The catch of the
pencil as it tangles in the fibers of the page, the gelid
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smoothness of the ballpoint unrolling a fat swath of ink,
the pliant bouquet of crayons, and the stink of colouring
markers. It should be counted as a windfall, a private
feast of roadside berries, that doodling offers a fossil
poetry as well (Battles, 2009, 108).

PAUSE

To a geologist a fossil is not dead, it is simply waiting to be exposed, it is hidden,
buried and contains infinite potential information. The doodle is similar to a fossil
as it starts by being buried deep inside our bodies and emerges by following
desires, bodily patterns and drives. The doodle then knows the dark secrets of the
deep, secrets that even our own language can never decipher, even if those
doodles do contain recognizable words, swirls and images (Battles, 2009, 106).
The doodle, for me, is a graphic depiction of bodily desires, drives and
experiences that appears slowly on the page, or in the studio space.

PAUSE

In her seminal text Revolution on Poetic Language (1984) Kristeva argues that
our philosophies of language, embodiments of the idea, are nothing more than
the thoughts of archivists, archeologists and necrohiliacs (1984, 13). In this
powerful opening paragraph Kristeva argues that we are constantly in a process
of trying to codify fragmented signs in an attempt to possess them. My own use
of boredom made a similar assertion, this term categorized a specific approach
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and closed down the potential multiplicity of the task through language.
Furthermore it also attempted to categorise and codify bodily experiences. These
bodily experiences are what Kristeva defines as The Semiotic, and are an
alternative, but also an additional, signifying sign system to our own language.
The more formal sign systems that we are used to, spoken or written word, is
what Lacan calls The Symbolic and is how the self is constructed. Kristevas
argument is that The Symbolic cannot easily decipher The Semiotic because of its
heterogeneity (1984, 39).

The term doodle itself is sloppy, and not very accurate, it is open to interpretation
and as such it can produce remarkable intimate moments. On Monday movement
was limited and static, after changing the term to doodle, the movement on
Tuesday had developed. Participants began to roll about on the floor, play with
pace and rhythm. They seemed to enjoy the texture of the floor on their clothes,
on their skin. They scratched and rubbed together body parts. By Friday, their
doodling had developed further, they spun on the floor, they rocked on the spot,
and made running motions with their legs in the air. There were also movements
that were indexical of their dance background, repetitive stretches occurred,
arms became outstretched, and bodies moved across the floor.

PAUSE

Whilst patterns were being made in the space that was indicative of dance, the
participants were not dancing. There was a type of in between state, which
suggests that these actions were not entirely devoid of language, or The Symbolic,
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but were also not fully engaging in the codes and codifications of their discipline
either. Kristeva argues that the semiotic is intertwined with formalist linguistic
structures. Communicating through speaking is an entirely corporeal experience,
in that we use our throats and our mouths to speak and use our ears to listen.
The semiotic although being a sign system of the body, is also social, we learn that
some words cause bodily responses (Kristeva, 1984, 68). As such, whilst the
participants were following their own desires and bodily drives, they also read
these, at least sometimes, through their own understanding of coded movement
and social interaction.

In reference to the overall training experience, one participant suggested that the
tasks felt erotic. When probed further, she elaborated that the warmth of the
room, and the relaxed nature of listening to the body all added towards this.
However she had also seen another participant moving her groin up and down
against the floor. This is an excellent example of Kristeva at work, with the
warmth of the sun on her skin, the repetitive motions and the positions that the
participants pulled themselves into we created an erotic space. Yet whilst
participant two agreed with the potential eroticism of her movement, she also
revealed that all she had done is relocate the rhythm and patterning from her feet
and placed it in her hips. There was no narrative or formal linguistic meaning
associated with this process and instead she was following her own impulses.

Multiplicity of meaning emerged as a result of The Semiotic figuratively rubbing
up against The Symbolic. The participants followed the texts of their bodily
desires, but in order to give these meaning we, as in I and the other participants,
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identified them as erotic and sexually charged. However this is not the only
place where a multiplicity of self-texts occurred. Whilst repetition results in a
recognizable pattern of time/place/action [where] quality emerges in a
perceivable proximity it is not fixed. The repetition of actions resulted in what
Matthew Goulish identifies as clearly shifting detail (Goulish, 2001, p.39). This
echoes Deleuze who argues that repetition is not simply the same thing
occurring over and over again as a copy. [I]t allows new experiences, effects, and
expressions to emerge. To repeat is to begin again; to affirm the power for the
new and the unforeseeable (Parr, 2010, p.125). As such it was in consideration
of this, that the repetition of these doodles, over and over again, and the
differences that occur, would allow for new experiences and feelings to emerge,
which would also allow way for new memories. As such this process was
designed to train participants to be sensitive to a variety of different information
systems relating to the self, not just what they understand, but also what they
experience and feel. Often these information systems cannot be translated in to
words, as they cloud or warp their understanding (Blom and Chaplin, 1988, 15).

So, if we look at the information offered to us about the doodle it would seem that
it is indexical of the abject: it is sensuous, yet it crosses the border from the inside
of the body onto the page (or the studio), it is recognizable, but has no real
meaning, and when pinned down with language it becomes cloudy and
inarticulate. Kristeva writes that the abject:

lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It
beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which
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nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced. Apprehensively,
desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects (Kristeva, 1982, 1).

The idea that the doodle might be indexical of the abject is not a massive leap of
faith, its location in the books and pages of your own writing already hints at this.
This is because the doodle might be seen to operate at the margins of our
language, perceptible but divorced from any apparent meaning, and in turn
recognized as meaningless scrawls. This observation for me is made more
pertinent when we look where the doodle has appeared: within the margins of a
book, or between your notes that have been taken in a meeting, in a lecture, or
during this paper.
PAUSE

In her seminal text Unmarked (1993) Peggy Phelan reminds us of performances
potential to index the abject. Performance in a strict ontological sense is
nonreproductive. It is this quality, which makes performance the runt of the litter
of contemporary art. Performance clogs the smooth machinery of reproductive
representation necessary to the circulation of capital (1993, 148). It constantly
crosses the boundaries between here and not-here, between real and memory. In
its constant state of disappearance the bodily doodle has all the attributes of the
drawn doodle, apart from the final object. The bodily doodle then, like
performance, becomes a metonym for character, self and of presence, in that they
are always shifting moving, ever so slightly away from any fixed representation
(Phelan, 1993, 150).

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The movement away also has the ability to defer meaning, which leaves scraps of
multiple texts for the participant to wade through feelings, emotions, memories
and desires all rubbing up against each other and clogging up the perception of a
unified identity. Eventually these texts start to seep out of every pore to reveal
the fragmentation and inevitable multiplicity of self in performance

PAUSE


Conclusion

This five-minute warm-up to my training schedule for a multiplicity of self,
proved to be an important factor for preparing the participants. On the one hand
there was a sense that this prepared them for becoming more sensitive to the
collection of fragmented scripts. On the other hand, because of the doodles
ability to be indexical of the abject, it also prepared them for the abject memories
that they were to experience later on in the week.

However, this process has also affected my own research, it became apparent
that I was using terms that were closing down multi-signifying signs in favour of
categorising and fixing approaches. It appears that the collection of these types
of texts needs an individual and inward focussed approach. By inflicting the
emotion being bored I was also attempting to fix the participants bodily
experiences. This becomes more pertinent when we consider Kristevas
argument that the bodily experience of The Semiotic and the social language of
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The Symbolic are intimately intertwined. Being bored is as much a bodily
experience as it is a mental one, and as such by offering this as a task, I was also
pre-empting or influencing the patterns and rhythms being explored in the task.
Avoiding this and by offering a loser term, doodle allows for a multiplicity of
texts to emerge. Im now left to wonder how this oversight has affected my own
approach to making work. As whilst this warm-up is only a very small part of
my process, how many other words and approaches have I employed that closes
down interpretation?

PAUSE

As I move into the next project of my PaR PhD I am left with the following
questions: When I performed this process my doodles were less abstract, I still
relied on rhythms and patterns, but these were focussed on stillness and were
easily recognisable repeatedly pouring salt into my mouth for example. When
using dancers as my participants all three seemed to perform more abstracted
versions of rhythms and desires. The result of this was the development of more
heterogeneous and multiple texts emerging. As such what affect does a greater
physical approach have on the development of texts in my own practice?


Finally, I also have questions that are more conceptually orientated towards the
representations of masculinity. How is The Semiotic and The Symbolic used in
my own study of multiple masculinities, and how might other signifying systems
be used to create heterogeneous meanings? Also, if the rubbing of The Semiotic
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against The Symbolic creates what Kristeva refers to as Significance why might
this be important to masculinity, and how can it explored through practice?