On Emergence

The connection of performance to movement, and particularly to time is important for understanding just what is meant by “oblique” or “tangential” actions. How do we think the forgetting of knowledge by the performer? Brian Massumi writes that “when a body is in motion, it does not coincide with itself. It coincides with its own transition: its own variation. The range of variations it can be implicated in is not present in any given movement, much less in any position it passes through.”(1) This means that the movement of the dancer cannot be deduced from the choreography of the dance alone.

Firenze, Trevor Patt

To use another illustration, real motion is decidedly unlike the simulation of motion by animation. Traditionally, the lead animator working on a particular scene would draw only the key frames of the scene. The remaining frames would be interpolated by the junior members of the animation team. The term “keyframing” survives in digital animation; the animator positions the digital model by hand only for a set of crucial poses and the animation software calculates the transition from one set position to the next.

The operation of stop-motion animation coincides with and even extends a Platonic model of art as a mere representation. Each intermediate cel is a more or less imperfect representation of its attending keyframes; it mediates between them, but never mobilizes them. The animation can increase its accuracy by adding frames, but will never succeed in being anything more than an illusion of movement. Compared to animation, the dancer can not be said to be performing any less when she is in between choreographed positions. Rather the entire performance is spent “in-between” positions. Not only are these positions illegible to the viewer, they are never occupied for more than an instant before they are moved through. The choreography simply does not have the determining effect that animation cels do, though forming the base of the dance, the information is forgotten by the performance.

Henri Bergson, explaining away the fallacies of Zeno’s paradox writes, “though we can divide at will the trajectory once created, we cannot divide its creation, which is an act in progress and not a thing.”(2) Any attempt to read movement as a sequence of points can only be done after the fact as a backplotting of rationalism. The powerful implications of this theory are the “range of variations,” the “plurality of centers,” and the “coexistence of moments” which are present in every movement. As a relation to its own indeterminacy, movement cannot be determinately indexed. Applied beyond dance, the singularity of duration and the multiplicity of movement provide the possibility for systems of emergence.


"Multiplicity must not designate a combination of the many and the one, but rather an organisation of the many as such, which has no need whatsoever of unity in order to form a system."(3)

Though forgotten material is no longer accessible in the construction of meaning, forgetting is not simply getting out of the way. We must remember the extent to which a theory of forgetting is a radically creative process. If a dynamic system is defined “by the ensemble of interactions in which it is involved,”(4) then forgetting is a catalyst that prevents stabilization and opens the possibility of meaning. More importantly, forgetting is not simply an operation (and cannot be reduced to one; operations operate through memory and memorization) and so resists settling into a predetermined form. A more deterministic process, any formalized process, becomes predictable and produces conformity with given conditions.

The illegibility of the work shifts its interaction with the subject from one of meaning to one of affect. How is the audience affected, what new performances have been created? Forgetting suggests a media “high in participation or completion by the audience”(5) Deleuze defined the subject as habit, “we start with atomic parts, but these atomic parts have transitions, passages, “tendencies,” which circulate from one to another. These tendencies give rise to habits... We are habits, nothing but habits–the habit of saying “I.”(6) Forgetting is quite simply the absolvement of these habits, non-identical repetition, less of the meaningless same, the movement of the subject through new developments. As with any other movement, these displacements may only be identifiable in retrospect, unrecognizable in their formation, but then recognition was never the point was it?

"And when wonder overtakes them, it is never in themselves but in the void surrounding them, in the space in which they are set, rootless and without foundation.The fictitious is never in things or in people, but in the impossible verisimilitude of what lies between them: encounters, the proximity of what is most distant, the absolute dissimulation in our very midst."(7)


1. Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual. p4.
2. Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. p309.
3. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. p182
4. Verstegen, Ton. Tropisms. p60.
5. McLuhan Marshall. Understanding Media. p36.
6. Deleuze, Gilles. Empiricism and Subjectivity. pX.
6. Foucault. Michel. Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside. Foucault|Blanchot. p22.