Introduction

At the beginning of my doctorate, the practice of the Manipulations was the departure point for considering the knowledge that is created in and through dance. In the further course of my research, however, my focus shifted from the Manipulations to the so-called research score.

The research score is a translation of the original duo practice of the Manipulations into a solo practice. In this solo version, the receiver works without a giver and explores how to re-create—all alone—the sensory experience of receiving Manipulations Number One and Number Two from an imaginary partner. In addition to re-creating the sensation of receiving the Manipulations, there is yet another additional task and modification of the original practice, which is to keep an eye on the process of thinking, and to articulate thoughts that arise in relation to a word or concept chosen beforehand. These thoughts are instantly written down, or they are spoken out loud.

What is key with regard to the research score is that the written or verbal articulation of thoughts is embedded within the practice of re-creation itself, rather than being separate from it. Instead of creating a gap between the physical practice and language, which separates the two into different action complexes, the research score interweaves into one and the same practice an exploration of the process of sensing with the expression of thoughts. By undoing the bracketing of language in the Manipulations, and by embedding a linguistic mode of reflection within the practice itself, instead of postponing it till afterwards, the research score challenges the duality of physical practice and linguistic reflection that is considered to be one of the main problems of research into performer training, as we saw in Chapter Three.

In the following, I first briefly reiterate what I take to be the most important characteristic features of the Manipulations, before elaborating in more detail on the techniques that constitute the research score.

Shifting Relations with the Manipulations

As elaborated in Chapter Three, I consider the Manipulations to be a practice for learning how to articulate bodies in order to cultivate their affectability. Based on the idea that bodies are open and constantly changing entities, the Manipulations foster an altered ecology of experience by cultivating a body that is fundamentally entangled with its environment, and which has the capacity “to establish a relationship of infinite influences”.1 By foregrounding the inter-corporeal physical relations between two more-than human bodies, rather than the inter-subjective social relationships between two individual human beings, the practice has the potential to alter the perception of a body in relation to itself and other bodies.

One of the main concerns when practicing the Manipulations is learning how to become Weather for the other body. This transformation of a body into a medium calls into question conventional notions of agency as the property of an individual body that is separate from other human and non-human bodies, and it raises issues of ownership: Who owns “the body that belongs to nobody”,2 created and co-embodied by the two partners during the Manipulations? What are the properties of this third body? How is it constituted, and what are its limits and extensions?

Training with the Manipulations is not so much about learning how to move, but rather about learning how to not move. The habitual relationship between proprioception and kinaesthesia is changed. Typically, a body’s proprioception is predominantly activated by its own kinaesthetic system—i.e. by movement—thus creating sensory feedback about this body’s relations to itself. However, in the Manipulations, the tactile-kinaesthetic articulation of the giver connects the receiver’s proprioception to a different kinaesthetic field of relations, thus manipulating the habitual perception of the receiver’s body in terms of how movement is initiated, and cultivating its capacity to experience being moved by someone—or potentially something—else. The practice thus prepares the grounds for the emergence of an altered ecology of experience in which a body’s relationality and processuality are emphasized.

A body’s capacity to become a medium—Weather—is valued more highly than the expression of individual or personal creativity. By allowing the body to be moved and manipulated by a giver, and by becoming receptive to Weather, the receiving body is given the opportunity to have a most unique experience, one which it could never have were it to move predominantly from the perception of relations within the body itself. The practice thus creates the grounds for an altered ethics of a ‘we can’, which differs from the ego-logics of the ‘I can’. The eco-logy of the ‘we can’ consists in a heightened capacity of the more-than-human body to be moved by potentially infinite influences, both in relation to itself as well to other human or non-human bodies, organisms, things, etc.

Learning to become (receptive to) Weather, it bears repeating, is an arduous and open-ended endeavour, and the training was developed in order to craft and provide appropriate tools along the way. In this sense, the Manipulations are a toolkit for learning how to articulate bodies, which consists of several intricately interwoven relational techniques of articulating a body in order to cultivate its affectability: techniques of touching, bracketing, releasing, breathing, attending, and reflecting. These techniques constitute the embodied knowledge that is created by the Manipulations.

What is at Stake with the Research Score?

The reason for reiterating what I take to be the most prominent features and aims of the Manipulations is because I want to highlight, as succinctly as possible, what is at stake with the research score. On the one hand, the research score is deeply anchored in—and indebted to—the heritage of the Manipulations. It builds on its conception of movement and body, continues its work, and strives for similar aims: to shift relations and to foreground an altered ecology of movement. On the other hand, the research score makes some significant changes to the practice in response to the particular aims and necessities of artistic research, thus enabling the Manipulations’ transformation into a medium of research (see Chapter Five). For practitioners who are more familiar with the tradition of Body Weather, the research score may appear to go against the grain of the original practice. However, I consider the research score to be a re-invention of the Manipulations that is more faithful to the aims and the philosophy of the original practice than it might at first seem.

At any rate, changing the Manipulations from a duo form into the solo practice of the research score raises a number of questions and issues. First, on a practical level and in relation to the process of re-creation: How does one physically re-create the sensation of being touched and moved by an absent body? How does one re-create the process of alteration, the becoming of a medium, of Weather? How does one single-handedly articulate ‘the body that belongs to nobody’?

Second, with the inclusion of language and verbal reflection in the practice: How does one negotiate the relations and the economy of attention between reflecting in the medium of the senses and reflecting in the medium of words – without subordinating one to the other? How does one construct the process of activating—and simultaneously tracing—different modalities of thinking without suffering a loss in the precision and specificity of their articulation? How does one re-create the shift from the inter-subjective to the inter-corporeal, as simultaneously thought and language become included in the practice and acknowledged as factors of experience? How does one prevent language from becoming the dominating factor of experience? Finally, what and how does a ‘body that belongs to nobody’ think?

Re-Creation

Many of these questions can be addressed pragmatically on the level of the techniques that structure the Manipulations. To begin with the issue of re-creation: I explored a number of ways of re-creating the sensation of being given the Manipulations by re-creating the effects of the technique of touch. One possibility is to imagine—as concretely as possible—where precisely the giver touches the receiver, and to localize the exact contact-point where the weight passes through the skin, and where it moves the body, or (a) part(s) of the body, for example the arms, the legs, or the head. Another way of re-creating the sensation of receiving is to draw on the memory of sensations experienced during exercises in the past, and to remember—in as much detail as possible—how it felt to be moved by an actual giver, when the weight entered the body, when it was directed through the body and into the ground, stimulating intense sensations of compression, densification, stretching, expansion, pain, opening, release, etc. Another approach to re-creation is to diligently trace and reproduce the form of a received touch-manipulation; for example, the spatial trajectory of the arms lifted and pulled backwards at the beginning of Manipulation Number One. It is also an option to try out a combination of these possibilities, either by going back and forth from one approach to the other, or by layering several of them simultaneously, which considerably increases the complexity of the process of re-creation. Finally, other ways of approaching re-creation may still be discovered in the future.

The Paradox of Re-Creation

No matter how carefully the process is constructed by the practitioner, the re-creation of being touched and moved by someone else will inevitably lead to the following paradoxical situation: How can you attain sensory feedback from movement when you are supposed to not move ‘by yourself’ and from the perception of your own body? How do you release, for example, the muscles in your neck when you actually need to use muscular effort in order to re-create the sensation of the head being lifted up from the ground and moved by the hands of an imaginary giver? How do you re-create the kinaesthetic-tactile sensation of being moved by someone else while at the same time working on suspending movement ‘by yourself’, and on minimizing muscle tension?

In the case of the Manipulations the situation is clear: the work is to switch off all muscle tension and to cut all volitional movement, as well as the stand-by mode of being ready to move by yourself. In the research score, however, the imperative to bracket volitional movement needs some recalibration, due to the different situation. Re-creating the feeling of being given and of receiving the Manipulations is impossible without moving the body at least minimally by oneself. The activation of memory and imagination alone will not suffice. No matter how hard the receiver tries to imagine and memorize the past experience of being manipulated by another body, the feeling of being moved by an imaginary giver will necessarily require some—if only minimal—volitional movement3 as a means to activate the proprioceptive system and to receive sensory feedback from it.

In my experience, imagination and memory alone are not sufficient to re-create the sensation of being moved. In order to obtain any feedback from the proprioceptive system and to actually get a sensation of being moved, the receiver has to invest muscular effort. In short, re-creation is impossible without softening the strict imperative to bracket intentional self-movement. The question is: Just how much self-movement is actually necessary in order to re-create sensations that are similar to those when being actually manipulated?

As long as the laws of gravity are in place, it is unavoidable to invest muscular effort in order to move and displace a body, or parts of it. However minimal that muscular effort may be, in terms of quality and intensity the concomitant sensation will inevitably differ from the sensation of being touched and moved by an actual giver. Due to the laws of gravity, an identical reproduction of the effects of the duo form of the Manipulations through the solo form of the research score is impossible. Any attempt to accomplish a truthful replication is necessarily bound to fail.

Negotiating Failure with Precision

This paradoxical situation can be perceived by a practitioner as frustrating and like ‘hitting a wall’. How can one handle the paradoxical situation that is created by these two contradictory tasks? How can one move towards the impossible, and cope with the inevitable failure? On the other hand, what is the benchmark for ‘failing’ or ‘succeeding’ at a task in the context of artistic research, where the value of a research practice consists less in its successful execution than in its potential to generate new knowledge?

Simply because it is obviously impossible to accomplish the mission of re-creation ‘successfully’, this does not automatically imply that all attempts will fail equally. The point is to not give up on the task of re-creation, merely because there is no way to do it ‘right’. Working towards re-creation is a matter of difference and degree. Eventually, some attempts to re-create the sensation of receiving will be more articulate and will create more differences than other attempts.

If the action of knowing consists in articulating a body in ways that proliferate rather than minimize differences, as we saw in Chapter Three, then the challenge of ‘re-creation’ consists in always failing with utmost precision. Each time the research score is practiced, failure produces difference, which makes it a practice that thrives on techniques of negotiating failure, and not a practice to be mastered. It is crucial to articulate the exact terms of failure in as much detail as possible, and to fail with ever more nuances and differently each time.

Negotiating Failure and Meta-Reflection

The technique of negotiating failure in the research score is similar to the technique of reflecting in and through the practice of the Manipulations, except for the difference that in the latter case negotiation takes place in relation to a real giver, whereas in the research score it happens in relation to the absent body of an imagined giver. In both cases, the negotiation of muscular tension and effort happens in and through a perceptual mode of reflection-in-action, i.e. in the medium of the senses, in particular the sense of touch and the kinaesthetic-proprioceptive system.

What makes the situation for the practitioner of the research score far more complicated, however, is that the activation of memory, imagination, and minimal muscular effort, as well as the tracing of their sensory effects, comprises an extremely demanding set of tasks that requires a considerable amount of effort on the level of attention. The intensity and complexity of the different tasks pursued in the research score require high-speed thinking-at-the-same-time, which can easily lead to a feeling of overload. This feeling can quickly lead to a collapse of multi-modal reflexive attention – the receiver’s focus becomes boiled down to one particular strand of activity, or to one particular mode or object of attention. In the vocabulary of Body Weather, this breakdown of multi-modal attention is referred to as ‘falling into tunnel-perception’.

This is when meta-reflection comes in. Meta-reflection is reflection on reflection-in-action. It is a technique to prevent the receiver from falling into tunnel-perception and from becoming controlled by their ‘autopilot’. Meta-reflection is a macro-perspective on the practice from within the practice. Decisions are made at high speed concerning the ‘cutting’ and (re-)directing of attention, the breaking of ‘flow’, the negotiation of effort and tension, etc. Meta-reflection asks: What is the overall situation and what is needed in order to (re-)activate the practice? This constant meta-reflective interrogation and observation of the practice from a macro-perspective is crucial both in the Manipulations and in the research score.4

Imaginary Breathing Through in the Research Score

In the process of re-creating the sensation of receiving, the negotiation of muscular effort and the distribution of attention are crucially supported by the technique of Imaginary Breathing Through. As outlined in Chapter Two, Imaginary Breathing Through is a solo version of the duo hands-on practice of Breathing Through. In the Manipulations, Breathing Through provides the receiver with a technique to mentally and physically reach toward the place of the touch, to attune to the giver, to make the skin permeable, to release tension, and to (re-)direct the attention.

I want to emphasize, again, the significant role of Breathing Through in terms of shifting relations between the giver and the receiver of the Manipulations, from inter-subjective to inter-corporeal. This shift enables the creation of an altered network of corporeal relations between the two bodies, which is crucial for the capacity to become articulated by the other body, by infinite influences and flows of intensities – by Weather. This capacity to kick-start the process of alteration makes Breathing Through a key technique for the process of receiving in the Manipulations.

In the research score, likewise, Imaginary Breathing Through plays a prominent role in re-creating the sensation of receiving the Manipulations, and the perception of being moved by Weather. The practice aims to restore relations with the (imaginary) giver, and, thus, the ecology of ‘we can’ that is key for the Manipulations. This is to say that the act of re-creation encompasses far more than merely reproducing a locally-confined sensation of being touched and moved by an imaginary partner. Re-creation is about reliving as comprehensively as possible the complex ecology and network of relations of a body that is being weathered. Aided by the technique of Imaginary Breathing Through, the research score strives for no less than the re-creation of a constantly changing and unbounded body of infinite influences—‘the body that belongs to nobody’—with the exception that this end is worked towards using the surrogate body of an imaginary partner instead of an actual one.5

It is therefore, in a way, misleading to call the research score a ‘solo’ practice. It seems to presuppose the body as a separate entity that enters into relations with its environs and with other bodies. But it is precisely this conception of ‘the body’ as a separate unit and pre-existing entity that is fundamentally contested by Body Weather. Bodies are conceived as multiplicities and in a state of constant becoming through embodying infinite relations. Bodies are always already more than one. It is therefore more appropriate to say that in the research score, Body re-creates Weather.6

Undoing the Bracketing of Language

As demonstrated in Chapter Two, the bracketing of verbal communication between giver and receiver is a key technique of the Manipulations (‘No talking!’). To briefly reiterate, the idea behind the suspension of verbal communication is that it enables the two partners to refine their non-verbal tools of exchange by foregrounding alternative modalities of relating such as touch, breath, kinaesthesia, and proprioception.

While the suspension of speech during the Manipulations is reasonable from a pedagogical perspective, as a means of supporting the transmission and the deepening of the practice, I see the risk that in the long run, the technique of bracketing language—and of bracketing thinking in the medium of words—could sediment as a habit, and that the separation of practice and language could become embodied as tacit knowledge.

From the perspective of a Body Weather practitioner, this separation may be justifiable, and even desired, as a means of shifting relations between bodies from inter-subjective to inter-corporeal, and in order to create an altered ecology of experience. However, combined with an implicit understanding of language as framing and fixing experience, the ongoing exclusion of language in the Manipulations is problematic, because it fosters a dualistic division between verbal language and physical practice.

The bracketing of language in the Manipulations is thus exemplary of the duality of physical practice and linguistic reflection, something that is considered a key challenge for research into performer training.7 It is important in this respect, however, to highlight that this duality is not an ontological given, but the result of a pedagogical method that deliberately separates physical practice and linguistic reflection into two different complexes of action: first we silently do the practice; afterwards we verbally reflect on and talk about it. The problem of this separation is that while it may be intended to be an emancipatory strategy to undo linguistic frames, it subjects bodies’ experiences to a new form of regulation by imposing a division between language and practice.8

Towards a Medium of Artistic Research

By undoing the bracketing of language, the research score breaks with the logics of separation. Considering language as just one more aspect of Weather, and as equivalent to other non-verbal modalities of expressing a body’s thinking, the research score embeds linguistic reflection in the ecology of experience that is created by the process of re-creation. It connects kinaesthetic-tactile and proprioceptive modes of thinking in and through the experience of movement with conceptually reflecting about the experience of movement. By including verbal articulation in the flow of practice, the research score creates an ecology of (interdisciplinary) practices that foregrounds the relations between bodily discourse and verbal discourse, thus challenging the ontological assumptions—and doing away with the methodological obstacles—that separate language and practice into categorically different domains and complexes of actions.

Laermanns suggests that “the unity of the difference between movement and non-movement […] defines the medium of dance”.9 Following this, I propose that it is the unity of the difference between movement and language that defines the medium of the research score.10 The research score embodies principles and values that have been advanced by the proponents of reflexive dance: the conjunction of movement and discourse, the rapprochement between theory and practice, and the attitude of research and reflexivity. Nevertheless, different from a conceptual(-ist) approach, it neither starts from an idea, nor is its main interest to experiment with the absence of movement. The aim of the research score is not to suspend movement in order to give more space to conceptual modes of knowing, or to bring concepts into the studio as a means of reflecting about the practice, but to build on the heritage of the Manipulations and to create a specific ecology of practices in order to explore the potential of the Manipulations as a medium of artistic research.

Writing with the Research Score11

Switching Off

Suspending the habitual mode of thinking

Changing the place of thinking

Relocating the place of observation

Observing thinking

Is there a difference between sensing and observing sensing?

Is there a difference between thinking and observing thinking?

Placing observation

Placing attention

Placing imagination

In the body

It seems that if I am able to observe sensations I am also more able to observe my own thinking

It seems like

There is something like a third place

Maybe also one is embedded in the other

The process of sensing is embedded in the process of thinking or reflecting

And the process of thinking embedded in sensing

Sensing thoughts while thinking sensation12

Observing thoughts

Observing sensations

Giving equal significance to thoughts and sensations

Giving time to what usually is not perceived

Giving time to the continuum of sensing through the body not just the surface

Not just the skin

But the deep tissues as well, muscles

Re-aligning body, re-aligning thinking

Connecting sensing and thinking through touch

Releasing thoughts

Thinking from the deeper muscles, deeper tissues, the fasciae, organs, bones

Getting closer to the imperceptible, insensible.

Peripheral proprioception

Is the third space rather a specific mode of being in time, a specific temporality?13

Changing the material texture of thinking

Thinking through the neck

In touch with another reality than the one that is given

Method of undoing subjectivity14

You become what you practice

By practicing becoming15

It seems that whenever I start with the work

The body already recognizes and goes into a mode of deep relaxation

Muscles of the legs softening

Memory and imagination activate the sensation of receiving

The legs and the arms know better how to relax than the torso

Learning the form of the Manipulations means to become able to do the form without being verbally instructed

Learning the sequence by heart by translating the explicit into the implicit16

Release in the chest

Not everything can be articulated

Not everything can become explicit

Being touched by someone else allows for a knowledge of the body that Otherwise would not be possible

That one might not be able to get on one’s own17

Either too much or too little

Negotiating the excluded middle

Reflecting in the doing and with the doing

To practice thinking by thinking with the practice

Training thinking ‘with’18

Creating the physical space for the permeability of thinking

To think also through your back

To expand the network

Training thinking and thinking training19

Training another mode of perceiving

Another mode of thinking

Changing the condition of the body

Is changing the state of mind20

The research score is not damaging the ecology of practice

In the process of translating practice into language

It is changing the ecology without destroying it

An interdisciplinary micro-practice

A technique of partnering verbal and non-verbal practices articulating the body

Creating an ecology that affords the co-existence and co-articulation of linguistic and non-linguistic modes of expression

Trying to articulate the difference between thought that is expressed in a language that grammatically repeats the notion of a subject

And a language beyond the bounded subject

How to express language in a way that does not re-invoke a subject of research?

Is Breathing Through creating the possibility for a thinking-through-and-beyond?

Composing language with re-creation21

Non-volitional reflection intentionally reflecting

A mode of reflection that does not want to achieve something

But that is open for whatever comes

A mode of reflection that allows for ideas

To come forth from some other place than the rational

A mode of reflection that makes sense differently

Doing thinking

Thinking doing

In relation to the ground, sound, light, the spine, mouth, breathe

And all the other things that are here and that are not here22

The research score as a re-activation of modes of thought in the Manipulations

Re-creation is not just re-creation of the sensation of the movement or touch-manipulation

But of modes of reflection23

Touch as a mode of reflection

As a mode of thinking through the body

Thinking through the body of an other

Reflecting on the experience of the touch

The quality

Reflecting not on ‘what does this mean?’

But on ‘what does it do?’

‘How does it work?’

‘What does it need?’

‘What does the other need?’24

How could you forget that you need a body to create knowledge?

Knowing how to release thinking

How to sense thinking

Wiggle the brain and shake the thoughts25

Going through the skin

Creating space

Listening

Articulating experience not as a definition

But as a proposition

Articulating with breathing through

Noticing pathways of breath and of passage

Coming in

Passing through

And going out

Breaths are touching26

Imagining to be articulated manipulated by J.

Breathing out through all pores of my skin simultaneously

Bringing into articulation sensations and altering the perception of the body

Altering habitual modes of self-articulation

Articulation as a practice of reading and writing the body

Sensing is a writing practice

Perception is a reading practice

Reflection is about the relationship between sensing and perceiving

Between reading and writing27

Bracketing emotions

In order to think

With a trans-subjective state of mind

Not getting into expressing

What or how the self thinks

Thinking with a body

That is in a mode of reassembling its parts

Dis-membering and re-membering28

Trajectories

Updating the here and now

Images of past giving

What’s different today?

Is it possible to sense a qualitative difference?

Imagination feeding into memory

They never coincide

The weather is different

The temperature

Never exactly the same twice

The sounds

Irreplaceable from the point of view of true and original experience

Repeatability as variation

There is difference in repetition

A sort of delimiting the horizons of experience29

With you

My imaginary partner

Together we re-create this body

Together with multiple other bodies

We don’t know, yet, what this technique can do

But we know that it works30

Sedimentation of space in the body

Sedimentation of body in the space

The hissing sound signals arrival on the floor

Relaxation

A change of mode

The activation of peripheral proprioception

Aligning bodies and minds

Agency as a temporal displacement of will

Non-volitional agency

Allowing technique to do its work

Not providing solutions

But a way of creating a field of study

Providing a repeatable set of actions

To compare and differentiate

A way of organizing organism

Its relations to itself and to other organisms

Present or not present

Not-yet-present

Still coming to be31

Where is the knowledge?

Has the technique become exhausted?

Has it exhausted itself?

Has it become completely outdone?32

Activating different modes of reflection

By attending through/to

Different modes of experience

By attending to multiple layers of experience simultaneously

Not only to what there is

But also to what has been

To what is yet to come

Memory and Imagination

Adding to what makes itself felt as present

The given Weather

If reflection instantiates a separation

Then attention is creating a stretch

A reaching towards

Creating not a separation

But a relation

Connecting different modes of reflection

In the medium of the senses

With reflection in the medium of words

In relation not only to the body

But also to other non-linguistic things

Are other things doing reflection with me?33

Allowing thoughts to emerge

By allowing for silence

For stillness in the movement of thoughts

A stillness that is alert and attentive

Ready to change direction at any moment

Attending also to what does not happen

What might come to the fore unexpectedly

A visual image from the past

An idea that has been waiting around the corner

An idea that I would not have been able to have otherwise

An idea that is born from a relation I have not had before

Born from a different temporality

From a different rhythm

A different kind of effort

Bodily state

Mental state34

Breathing through space

Spacing through breath

If one is many

Then the minimum unit is more than two

Sometimes touch is following breath with breath leading

Sometimes touch directs breath

Leads breath to find the opening created by touch

Working hand in hand

The research score is a partnering practice

Partnering imagination and memory

Breath and Attention

Finding the release

Finding openings35

Cutaneous thinking

Thinking with the skin as a relational organ

Breathing through the brain

Solidity of the skull

Versus the permeability of the soles of the feet

Sometimes it doesn’t need extra weight by another body

One’s own weight is just enough

The stranglehold of representational language

The stranglehold of language representing experience

How to open that up?

How to get out?36

Slightly different path

Pushing thought into another direction

Letting it orbit around body

It enters your head

From the back

Through the neck

Through the ribs and through your hands

Into the touch

It comes not with will

But with clarity and determination

To the point

Making itself felt

Forcefully

But without force

Carried by the weight

And sweetened by the honey of your touch

Delicately tasting the sole of the foot

Opening the honey-trap

Undoubtedly missing you37

Sensations that create a perception of surrender

Surrendering to someone or something else

Coming in and passing through

Legging

Skinning

Feeting

Touching

Grounding

Creating space for imagination to activate relations and intensities

Space in-between

Ma

Real time entering

Pre-creation for future enterings

An opening to the past

Enabling an opening to the future

Is it an opening

Or is it an activation of a dormant potential?

Is the relation already there

Or is it generated?

Is it significant to make a distinction between that which is activated

And that which is created?38

Temporality

Created by the rhythm of breathing

In collusion with the sequence

Expectations of how it feels

Action and perception patterns

Established modes of perception

Orienting the sensations of imaginary receiving

Can the practice of the research score undo

Established modes

Of sensing and perceiving in the practice of the Manipulations?

Established modes

Of perceptual thinking?

Can it expand

The register of thinking?

Can it change

The practice of the Manipulations?39

Has ‘translation’ become exhausted?

Has the concept become tacit?

Has it become unproductive?

Merely habitual?

Repetitive without difference?

Or can it still produce difference?

Can that difference be articulated?

Does it need to be articulated verbally?

Is it not enough to articulate it perceptually?

In movement?40

Words activating the practice

Retrieving relations

Words as a means to re-access past experience

Relations

Touching the concept with my mind

Putting all the effort in the listening

Without tensing

Searching for the right tonus

Allowing thoughts to come to expression

Curious about the futurity of the research score

Looking forward to leave behind this still kind of lonely practice41

Putting together and apart

Separating and joining

Isolating and connecting

At the edge of the articulatable

The effable

Staying long enough with prearticulation

For the not-yet-thought to emerge

The different

The new

With and through the floor

Weight puncturing

Body as passage

Thought becoming felt

Coming to expression with touch

Is it a method to capture thought

Or a technique to release thinking?

Minimizing the effort of thought’s extraction

Minimizing the effort to com-pre-hend

How are the notions of the untouchable

And the ineffable

Related to each other?42

To think a body from its limits

To take thought into the touch

Creating a different set of relations

To think with you

Articulating the body differently

Reflectively

With difference

Your thinking entering

Passing through

Our thinking coming together

Thought that belongs to no body

Touching skin-ground

Reaching into the floor

Beyond body

Floor knows how to support

Knows how to take weight

Embedded in an ecology

Body experiencing floor

Floor experiencing body

Floor in my skin

Body activating floor

Activating floor in my head

Floor in my chest

Thinking through a floored body

Body in the floor

And floor in the body

Floor-ing thoughts

Affected by deep touch

Knowledge in the technique of creating that ecology

Thought’s organization

Distribution of sense

Sensing and sensed

Stillness and moving

Listening

Resting

Spacing time

Deeply touched by the floor

Breathing through the touch

Proper sense of touch touching its metaphorical sense

Is it possible to touch on those layers

Of deeply sedimented knowledge?

What do the ribs have to say?

The repetition of bodily knowledge

Conscious and unconscious reflectivity

A repetition of the same?

A repetition of possibilities instead of potential?

Articulating the space between the ribs and the floor

Articulating space around

Trusting the practice to do its work

Staying in prearticulation is not the worst that can happen

Is the existing ecology sufficient?

Is it ever sufficient?

To open up the practice to its potential?

Isn’t there always

A necessity to generate

New articulations

New relations?

To produce something new?

What if the new is non-conscious?

That would be not-knowing what one knows43

Installing ‘language’

Allowing it to be part of the game

Relaxing the tongue

Tickling out words

Teasing them

Pleasing them a little

Multiple places of articulation

And dis-articulation

Reading as writing

Weathering language

Changing corporeal relations

The ecology of speech

Including that pain in the right lower back44

In the mess of thoughts

Waiting

Listening for something to come to the fore

Articulated by the vocal chords

Without becoming forced

Kenosis

Non-descriptive

Or at least not only descriptive

Sedimented words that are touched upon

Depth versus surface

To infinity

Where nothing ever returns

Diffracted and inflected

On its way to

Becoming dissolved45

Suspended

But not absent

A way of communicating

Touching

Or in touch with the more-than-human

Reflectively touching

Without projecting one’s own needs

To be for the other

A kind of knowing that emerges between two bodies

Always going to the edge of not-knowing

Studying

Without grasping

Holding

Moving through together

Allowing experience to speak

Maybe not for itself

But in its own terms

Not outside of language

But in a language that

Is more adequate to

The heart of the experience46

An alphabet of touch

Each touch a letter

Attention as the ink

Not written on the body

But a kind of writing with the body

Not the body speaking for itself

But with many others

Touch is not inscribing onto the body

The body is not a surface of inscription

Not a blank sheet of paper

The body is with language

Multiple languages

Multiple streams of signs47

Writing with the other

Editing together

Being written

Co-articulation

Breathing word by word

Creating space for words to pass through

For thoughts to be affected48

Spelling out experience differently each time

Shifting attention to another page

Repetition and singularity

Singularity through repetition

Maintaining a close relationship with the phrasing of receiving

Insisting on difference

Attention as a means to not fall into automatisms

Maintaining alive the conversation with imagination

Refreshing the body’s experience of the work today

The desire to give myself to the other

To let the other in

To re-experience 1000 plateaus of touch

Together49

Words

The world

Worlds in a word50

Articulating the body

Creating space

For creating words51

Giving weight to words

Giving ground

Relating words to place

Placing words

Taking words to the limits52

Not everything can be felt and sensed

And not everything can be spoken out and said

There are limits to what can be said

Same as there are limits to what can be felt and sensed53