Microscopicpolitics and Imargination in the Shareable Intimate Rituals in the CPP_Implicações Project

La Microscopique-Politique et l’Imargener dans les Rituels Intimes Partageables du Projet CPP_Implicações

ABSTRACT

How to survive the end of a world model? We could say: by opening up space so other worlds may be established, and by holding up the sky through the invention of a dance that is possible for the body that there is. In a pandemic and necropolitical context, we collectively perform and invent our rituals through video conferencing platforms in bordering actions from the project named Body, performance and the political in implication (CPP_Implications). In an artistic investigation influenced by authors such as Airton Krenan, Davi Kopenawa, Erin Manning, Baruch Spinoza, Jane Bennet and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro we cartographically coined two terms: microscopicpolitics and the act of imargination.

Keywords:
Dance; Performance; Artistic Investigation; Body-World

RÉSUMÉ

Comment survivre à la fin d’un modèle du monde? Nous osons dire: en ouvrant d’espace pour que d’autres mondes s’installent et en soutenant le ciel avec l’invention d’une danse possible au corps qu’il y a. Devant un contexte pandémique et nécropolitique nous inventons nos rituels et nous performons collectivement sur des applications de vidéoconférence les actions limitrophes du projet Corps, performance et le politique en implication (CPP_Implicações). Dans une investigation artistique influencée par des auteurs comme Airton Krenak, Davi Kopenawa, Erin Manning, Baruch Spinoza, Jane Bennet et Eduardo Viveiros de Castro nous fécondons cartographiquement deux termes: microscopique-politique et l’action d’imargener.

Mots-clés:
Danse; Performance; Investigation en Arts; Corps-Monde

RESUMO

Como sobreviver ao fim de um modelo de mundo? Arriscamos dizer: abrindo espaço para que outros mundos se estabeleçam e segurando este céu com a invenção de uma dança possível ao corpo que se é. Perante um contexto pandêmico e necropolítico, performamos coletivamente e inventamos nossos rituais via plataformas de videoconferência em ações fronteiriças do projeto Corpo, performance e o político em implicação (CPP_Implicações). Em uma investigação artística com influência de autores como Airton Krenak, Davi Kopenawa, Erin Manning, Baruch Spinoza, Jane Bennett e Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, fecundamos cartograficamente dois termos: microscopicopolítica e ato de imarginar.

Palavras-chave:
Dança; Performance; Investigação em Arte; Corpo-Mundo

Introduction

What is left for an urban population, immersed in capitalist dynamics, that is facing the imminent end of its world model? Bearing witness to countless deliberate deaths, accompanying the political, economic and health crises in Brazil and conscious of the global ecological crisis, would it be possible to conjure up another notion of the world and find a dance to hold up this sky? These are some of the questions we address in the inventive process of the Rituais íntimos partilháveis (shareable intimate rituals) from the extension project Corpo, performance e o político em implicação (Body, Performance and the Political in Implication) (CPP_Implicações) on the Bachelor and Licentiate degree course in Dance at Universidade Estadual do Paraná (UNESPAR).

Mediated¹ by virtual communication platforms, we articulate a possibility for inventing performative rituals in videoconference rooms, embracing the suspensions that the restrictive context itself, and the attempt against life, have produced in us. When considering the traversing of a pandemic and extremely disturbed scenario, we ask ourselves: how can we sustain an investigative process in the arts of presence that demonstrates the pulse of life in its different manifestations? This report presents a part of this research, dating from the year 2020, when we were impelled towards the perceptual rescaling of an idea of life, the environment, and our strengths, which also entailed an invitation to deviate from grandiloquence. Since then, in a microscopic-political manner and in an act of imargination, we have tried to tune in to what is beyond us, investing in the potentialities of bodies and encounters, clearly harnessing the idea of inseparability between the world, which is a living body, and the body, which is a living world.

In this research, which involves the intersection between dance and performance and the discussion of the intrinsic relationship between art and life, the development of performance propositions/provocations and virtual encounters to collectively perform the inseparability of the body with the medium is what characterizes the process. This report focuses more on the aspects that engender the creation and sharing of the performance propositions/provocations than on the discussion of the collectively developed performances. It reveals some of the factors that drive the gesture of provoking-activating performances and the conceptual elements that fuel the journey.

The purpose of this text is to scrutinize a situated experience of creation in art in view of the forms of doing and circumscribing the practice. It is in the outline of a cartographic methodological path (Passos; Kastrup, 2013) that this study is developed: in the resonance of questions that first emerge in the body. Far from a colonizing cartographic logic, which operates by demarcating and the already knowing, the circumscriptive operation that takes place here invests in the not knowing, evincing a focus on the emergences of the encounters and certain questions that unfold from them. For this reason, the incursion occurs more through the narrative aspect, in the sharing of the process, and less through the presentation and discussion based on other references from the field of art. The methodology expounded here resonates with the provocations of the experiential-corporal orientation of the process. It considers its reliefs, recesses, and even deviations, because it is in the deviation of what is already known that other cognitive paths can develop.

Based on the discussion on inventive cognition, Virgínia Kastrup (2015) affirms art as a potential provocateur of suspensions in the regime of habitual attention. The creative process shared here bears that out, having a character of invitation to experiences less dictated by habit - despite going through it - in the investigation of other possible relations of the body in the composition with the environment. The idea that bodies constitute themselves in metastable relationship with the environment (Simondon, 2003) is very much present in the creation of the propositions/provocations in performance mentioned here. Their procedures are articulated in an approximation with the spoken and written registers of Airton Krenak (2015; 2016; 2019) and Davi Kopenawa (Kopenawa; Albert, 2015a; 2015b) who announce the end of the world and tell of their dance movements to hold up the sky. In the light of the perceived fallacy of an idea of human superiority, we are left to question in art, and as urban bodies, what dance is possible for us and what sky to hold up?

The aim of giving vent to a possible dance of celebration at the end of a specific world - protagonized by white men and their ideals - and the desire to establish other possibilities for the world mobilized the invention of two poetic terms that sustain the practice: microscopicpolitics and the act of imarginating. This living articulation, open to reformulations in experimentation with the body’s possibilities, also draws on Erin Manning’s (2016; 2019) proposal of the minor gesture, Baruch Spinoza’s (2009 [1677]) theory of affections; Jane Bennett’s (2010) attention to the vibration of things in provocations, and the Amerindian perspectivism discussed by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2002; 2017).

The topic: Corpo, performance e o político em implicação (Body, performance and the political in implication) contains a presentation of the project, its modes of operation and an exposition of the procedures developed in the articulation of virtual encounters. The topics: Uma investigação situada; Digressão; e Retomada (A situated investigation; Digression; and Resumption), a presentation of the process developed during 2020 discusses a more localized relationship between the experiences lived in the project and the spillovers of the global pandemic context, highlighting the implementation of a politics of death. In this excerpt a hypothesis is raised that movement - in activation and sensitive mapping of the body’s potentialities - in its relationship with the vibrations of microscopic and almost invisible existences, may be a way of searching for the joyful affections that increase the power to act and, consequently, to live (Spinoza, 2009 [1677]).

In the topics: Microscopicopolítica, uma invenção-manifesto (Microscopicpolitics, an invention-manifesto) and Imarginar, um modo-invenção (Imarginate, an invention-mode) there is an expanded discussion of the terms microscopicpolitics and imarginate, which are the poetic engines for the propositions/provocations undertaken in this project. Microscopicpolitics is a term invented as an invitation to pay attention to the greatness and incidence potential of the almost invisible forces and existences (or visible according to the perceptive conditions). This proposal is based on the assumption of the ungovernable power of variation of bodies, which takes place in the realm of the smallest, the quasi microscopic, but which also resonates in a broader dimension that comprises the political aspect of this mobility. Imarginate is another neologism emerging in this process, which brings together the act of imagining, understood as the possibility for creating images, and the ungovernable powers engendered in the act of operating on the fringes.

The topic Considerações (Considerations) focuses on the possibility of an artistic investigation process being guided by a sensitive cartography, that is, by a mapping of the subtlest manifestations of the bodies’ potentialities in a situated manner. The quest to broaden and refine our perception of the vibrations, properties and possibilities of different existences - the human and non-human ones that compose the environment and that compose us -, is an open invitation.

Body, Performance and the Political in Implication

Body, performance and the political in implication (CPP_Implicações) is an extension project involving an artistic investigation into creative processes in dance and performance, which seeks to highlight the connections between the body and the collective context. One of its modes of operation is based on the discussion, invention and exercise of compositions in consideration of ethical, aesthetic and political aspects, putting into perspective the dimension of coexistence, the production of subjectivity and the ways of thinking/making art.

I coordinate CPP_Implicações but it takes place in interlocution with several other research artists, such as the research professors Michele Schiocchet and Nara Cálipo; the researchers Zélia Caetano; Juliana Liconti; Paloma Bianchi; Maeza Donnianni; and the students Joanes Pedro Barauna (João Pedro Barauna) and Korpa Enkantada (Karlos Augusto). The project has this name since 2019, when it was established at UNESPAR, but the research that drives it predates it, as it dialogues with the artistic research carried out in the Mapas e Hipertextos (Maps and Hypertexts) collective. The investigation and development of profanations in inventive performance rituals have been ongoing since 2017 among artists from this collective, who also work in the CPP_Implicações project².

The process unfolds in this project through propositions/provocations and performative encounters. The sessions take place weekly on a video call platform, but communication also takes place via e-mail and a virtual communication application. In order for the academic and external community to participate frequently, registration is available at the beginning of each semester. For occasional participation - in open meetings that usually take place on Saturdays - those interested must register one day in advance. It is an activity aimed at the whole community, and there are no prerequisites other than availability and the ability to communicate over the internet. On the day of the meeting, the group receives a text message containing a performance proposition/provocation to be collectively mobilized, and an excerpt from a text related to the issues discussed in the project, as can be seen in the following example³ (Figure 1):

Figure 1
Print of message sent on July 22, 2020 with performance proposition/provocation.

Regarding the structure of the virtual meetings, they are divided into three periods, each lasting forty minutes, which include proposal presentation, activation of the collective performance, and the mapping and sharing of impressions from what was experienced. All the meetings are recorded, generating a large video collection that is shared with participants⁴. Certain images of the experience are published on social media as a means of increasing awareness⁵.

Initially, the making of the propositions referenced materials such as the book Grape Fruit (2008/2009) by Yoko Ono (2009), the initiatives of the Fluxus⁶ group and the idea of performative program as proposed by the artist-researcher Eleonora Fabião (2013; 2015). As the process progressed and in view of its situated character, the propositions gained a singularity more consistent with procedures in the field of dance. Their focus remains on the invitation to bodily movement, on redirecting attention to the body in/with the environment, and on the attempt to constantly redo the question based on Spinoza’s Ethics (2009 [1677]): o que pode o corpo? (Duenha, 2019).

Thaise Nardim (2020), when addressing performance and the use of written language, highlights the idea of text as force, as deviation from the slogan, with the potential to deprogram the body. Nardim (2020, p. 58) proposes the relationship with writing as an exercise of a “text-force” capable of being experienced in the flesh, whose routes are open and an effect of incessant operations. Retroactively, it is possible to consider an attempt to open space to different operations in the writing of the propositions/provocations from the CPP_Implicações project; however, they remain rather as an invitation to produce a force-movement, an operation that takes effect in the body on the attention and performative unfolding of its affections. Nardim’s (2020; 2021) writing and propositions have repercussions in the manner of approach attributed to the composition of the performances in the CPP_Implicações project but with a track very much grounded in experience through movement: it involves sensitive mapping, which goes from body composition (skin, bones, muscles, cells, etcetera) to the manifestation of its potentialities for poetic production in attention to the macro and microscopic ecology it is composed of. What we do in the performance field is positioned as a relationship of composition in/with the environment, always to be resumed.

During the first semester, as a response to Krenak’s Ideias para adiar o fim do mundo (Ideas for postponing the end of the world) (2019) and the need to find ways to survive the pandemic context and socio-political crisis, the performative encounters were named: Rituais íntimos partilháveis para sobreviver, por mais um dia, ao fim do mundo (shareable intimate rituals to survive the end of the world for one more day) (Figure 2 and 3). After a few months in the process, this name seemed somewhat contradictory due to the fact that we were mostly white, urban people, relatively detached from the Amerindian worldview. In the face of an anthropocentric culture in a capitalist system, keeping this name seemed to be advocating the survival of humans and a specific group of humans as privileged. In Krenak’s writing (2019) there is a much more integrated notion between humans and non-humans. His incisive position in relation to the capitalist system that consumes the earth, that changes the place of the mountain, as he himself denounces, offers us clues about the world needing to end and which sky we can hold up with our invented dance. In the second semester, in view of the path we had followed, the encounters took on another name: Rituais íntimos partilháveis para a invenção de outros corpos e tempos (shareable intimate rituals for the invention of other bodies and times), which was in tune with what we had experienced until then and anticipated what we would dedicate ourselves to next.

Figure 2
Print of the collective performances video recorded in the Rituais íntimos partilháveis encounter on July 15 July, 2020.

Figure 3
Print of the collective performances video recorded in the Rituais íntimos partilháveis encounter on July 22 July, 2020.

We appropriate the term ritual from its use as a practice, as an encounter and as a grouping of several actions. Although we move a field of intentionalities, which seems to go beyond the dimension of a more expressed physicality, our profane rituals remain as encounters of actions in art. It is important to mention that we do not consider what we do as a rehearsal, nor as a presentation. It has the character of an encounter in which everyone is a performer. This is a stance in the face of a reiteration of the division between audience and artist that regards the audience as passive, as receivers of information, and the artists as movers and performers who present the dance, the message. The proposal is to experience a dynamic that dilutes these borders a little in favor of a more manifest implication. The concomitance of life events does not only afford us the place of staunch observers. We extend a very explicit invitation: whoever participates performs together, in relation to what happens on the other screens, and in co-operation. The propositions/provocations are an invitation to the simultaneous collective performance as a marginal operation to produce other images of the world. They call for the mobilization of a microscopic world within the space of the house, which starts from the body and expands into the virtual environment. They are also a way of summoning the body to become trans, in the many senses (of vector) that this prefix can bear: transformed, transverted, transmuted, transvestited, transviated. In other words, to change something, in the minimum, the intimate, or the microscopic, considered imperceptible at first sight.

A Situated Investigation

The investigative process in CPP_Implicações follows a route that involves the context and the body in context. Given the desire to maintain the research of creation in art in a constant inter-relationship between artistic creation and the mapping of daily life events in a broader manner, issues concerning sociopolitical aspects and questions more linked to Brazilian institutional politics are brought into the process frequently. The propositions/propositions are always developed in resonance with what has been experienced in each previous meeting and in consideration of contextual issues, especially those that gain prominence in the media.

Some impulses for the development of the propositions/provocations and the performances during 2020 were due to the political circumstances and the sensations of being greatly affected in this context. Feelings of incapacity and paralysis were recurrent in the many discussions we had. We often felt immobilized in the face of the growing political-institutional earthquake that this country has been going through⁷. On top of these conditions we have the tragedy common to the whole world: the COVID-19 pandemic, which also took away any illusion of direct and strictly individual action. Obviously, the issues highlighted in the pandemic and the socio-political problematics are not reduced to events in one country, but we focused on what was most present in us: the sensations of living in the flesh a world project based on extractivism, violence, sadism, and derision. Our bodies were (and still are) affected by the evident negligence in relation to environmental issues such as the irresponsible exploration of the planet’s resources, the exponential deforestation in the Amazon, reports on the spread of fascist thought, denialism, and conservatism. We are witnessing the deliberate implementation of a policy aimed at the extermination of diverse groups, the so-called minorities. How significant is our gesture in the face of such events?

Foucault (2008) states that the biopolitical dynamic does not occur in explicit demarcation of the bodies that are oppressors and the bodies subject to oppression; in his view, there is a systemic operation embedded in the social and cultural structure that can lead us to operate in one or another dynamic and in different instances. However, there is a use of power that is linked to entrenched sociocultural aspects that delimit power over life, the biopower addressed by Foucault (1984), from which Achile Mbembe (2016) proposes an approach such as necropolitics. Mbembe (2016) addresses the issue of racism and slavery based on the Foucauldian idea of biopower. He discusses sovereignty grounded in the power to dictate who lives and who dies, questioning what fuels the idea of power of life and death over another body. Among the factors identified by this author is the fictional creation of what is considered the enemy and the existence of a kind of selection based on the biological aspect. Living and creating other affective alliances (Krenak, 2016) in such demarcated conditions is an affront to this dynamic of control over bodies.

How can one continue researching art in a catatonic state? By also researching this state and moving what is possible. If we cannot act in a timely manner on collective issues - those that refer to the Brazilian political-institutional dynamics in light of the cultural crisis we are going through, or even on global issues -, it is up to us, as artists, to bet on the dimension of the intimate, on the microscopic dimension of affectation of (and in) the body, as presence in the world. Perhaps, we should invest in movement and in an idea of regeneration of the kind that first ensures a support base for bodies trying to survive amidst the deaths planned by the necropolitical system (Mbembe, 2016).

From the Foucauldian idea of biopolitics, its conception as a cultural practice that produces what is experienced as natural (Bennett, 2010); from contact with Amerindian perspectivism and all the questioning of the culture of a split between humans and non-humans (Viveiros de Castro, 2002); from the invitation to pay attention to invisible forces, to the humor of the winds and the trees (Krenak, 2015; Kopenawa; Albert 2015a; 2015b), we were called upon in this research into art to reframe our attention, our gestures, and the idea of their resonance in the environment. It was possible to comprehend that the mode of operation of our practice occurs in the assumption of the macroscopic and microscopic forces that affect the world, including our own, which, like a virus, can make us live or die in unimaginable dimensions.

In view of this, and perhaps as a death defying impulse, it occurred to me that our practice was mobilized by a microscopicpolitics that involves both the recognition that we relate to other microscopic existences all the time, and the idea that it is also a political dynamic that takes place in some instances. Politics here is seen from two aspects, based on the discussion raised by Latour (2004): as a dynamic that triggers the ways in which the relations between humans and non-humans happen; and as a movement that interferes in the collective life among humans, considering the aspects of dissonance. A highly contagious virus is studied in terms of its dynamic relationships: with what it composes; with what it breaks down; how fast; which environmental factors make it persevere in existence and which do not. The existence of a virus that greatly interferes in human lives also determines the relationship politics of the collective dynamic, thus transforming it.

Digression

When we think about how inseparable we are from the environment - which is also evident in Simondon’s theory of individuation (2003) that invites us to understand that the one is always more than one because it is in constant movement of co-engagement with the environment -; by imagining the countless amount of microorganisms present in the air - and that we aspirate, letting them be part of us voluntarily or involuntarily - it is possible to surmise, for the composition of this practice, that the invisible, or almost invisible, is constantly mobilized in us, by us, and that this refers to the potency of existence in human and non-human bodies. This operation does not always occur through a main path, but through the fringes, in an almost inapprehensible movement, which leaves clues from the consequences that emerge.

If the body exists in constant relation with other bodies, as Spinoza (2009 [1677]) suggests in his theory of affects; if the environment is configured and reconfigured by what is human and non-human; and if our relations with the world are predominantly guided by a perceptual mode that considers what is deemed visible and animate (Bennett, 2010), another perceptual regime would be called upon to account for more subtle forces at work in the environment. In his treatment of the bodies’ power to exist, Spinoza (2009 [1677]) states that there is a natural tendency to persevere in life. This tendency, which he calls conatus, is elevated or reduced in the face of happy or sad encounters. In his view, it is knowledge of the affects that leads the body to search for the joyful affects. The joyful or sad affections can, in turn, emerge from the most diverse and uncontrollable encounters, but the attention to the possibility of perceiving, in some dimension, what occurs, offers us the means to differentiate and restrain the affections that de-potentiate us. Logically, this is not a less complex operation. In fact, we don’t have to be seduced by an exclusively rationalist perspective that allows us to deceive ourselves about the ungovernability of the affections. Considering this complexity that puts into play an uncontrollable dynamic, how can we manage affections when faced with the risk of conditioning our perceptive arsenal?⁸. Would it be possible to escape the risk of death, or not anticipate it in the face of invisible forces and microscopic existences?

In her book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Jane Bennett (2010) announces the vibrant potencies of forms of existence deemed inanimate, almost invisible, and even invisible. Faced with this provocation, it is possible to imagine that if we constantly relate to these existences, if we compose and decompose with them, their vibration can be perceptible to some extent. This perception may possibly occur as an affected body, in mapping what happens to it, as an imprecise act of groping. This is where the invitation to cultivate another regime of attention becomes evident: to cultivate a less fragmented and dichotomous notion of the relationships that take place in the composition of the environment. A sensitive cartography seems to be a way to name the process linked to the flow of other perceptual possibilities that are not merely the usual ones. Such possibilities embrace a distributed attention that resorts to sensory aspects, to the ways in which bodies are affected and manifest themselves.

Any intention of questioning habits also involves making cracks in what is established. This is a clear invitation in the discussion evoked by Bennett (2010) who challenges us to tune in to the vibration of things. It may be worth mentioning here what Kastrup (2007) discusses concerning inventive cognition, which takes place in the suspension of the usual regime of attention. Faced with a surprise, or something not known, or assumed as mapped to cognition, we are capable of provoking other cognitive paths. Since we don’t have an immediate response through the usual paths, we invent paths and make other connections.

Resumption

Digressions aside, or rather, presented, we were able to arrive at the hypothesis that the invention of a dance capable of marking, in the body, the end of this world and the establishment of other worlds can emerge from the opening of perception to the environmental conditions, from refining the attention to the multiplicity of existences and from the recognition of the potencies of life in play: our own; those of the elements and agents with whom we relate; and those emerging from the circumstances. All of this, in attention to micro and marginal modulation operations. The reading of the daily news and the act of introducing it into experimentation, even as a proposition/provocation for performance, has become recurrent. How can we ignore that which takes hold of the body, even in relation to events that take place in broader contexts, apparently far from our power of effect? We opted for the possibility of moving these traversals.

As a body in a constant process of coengendering with the environment (Simondon, 2003), we try to make room by opening ourselves up to something else. We do not abandon or mask the pain and those sad affections that take us over, but we put them on the agenda, in movement. The aim is to transmute them in some way, even if intimately, because the intimate also carries a public dimension if we relativize these terms in consideration of their various instances. In this process, we take into account a fine line that separates the inside and the outside, the mutual incidence between the dimensions of the smaller and the larger, the me and what is beyond me. We proceed from the understanding that we are the environment, an environment filled with a multiplicity of minimal existences that vibrate (Bennett, 2010). Tuning into these vibrations is a great challenge that involves a reconfiguration of the perceptual modes already co-opted by habit. Our resources emerge in the frequentation of the habit until we can dishabituate ourselves. We also occupy the uninhabited, the unimagined, the non-linear, and the apparently disconnected universe of the dream.

We are on a wandering process. We keep probing the emerging clues on the environment-path and on the body-path. How can we dance the end of the world? How do we bury what must be buried and what did not choose to die? How can we make room for another world-mode, another body-mode? Therefore, we initially invested in sustaining the body, with the crooked pillars we had: asymmetric pieces of bamboo, our warped wooden slats, our material and subjective junk. In an uncontrolled and even somewhat chaotic way, the care of the self began to produce folds aimed at that which was beyond the self. We tried to pay more attention to the conversation of some wise shamans and representatives of the first peoples, establishing a possible alliance (Krenak, 2016), from the place of privilege (or not) in which we are situated. We brought their words to the collective performance and opened our parachutes (Krenak, 2019), in the hope that the choice would be for the colorful.

In the face of such presences (or their signs), revisiting the world model (capitalist, extractivist) in its ultimatum sounds like a rallying call. If the hardest question is in the false notion of split, of separability between the human body and the body of the Earth, the opposite direction can be driven. Based on the propositions/provocations, we mobilize the notion of inseparability, as possible: inseparability from the cold floor of the house, unfit for dancing, but appropriate for dancing at end-of-world times; inseparability from the sofa we bump into when moving, from the appliances that are part of the house decoration, from the walls that confine the body, from the air and the micro-organisms that penetrate our bodies, and from the changes to the surrounding environment. We dedicate ourselves to learning how to open the parachute, not to succumb immediately, looking for the necessary resources for survival in the potentialities of the body in encounter. We continue to pay attention to the possibilities of the emergence of another world within us. We go through farewell rituals, healing rituals, and instauration rituals, as we named them later in a retrospective look at what was experienced. The provocations/activations in these rituals involve the following invitations:

In the farewell ritual: experience what the body drags along in the trajectory produced in its relationship with the space; inhabit the non-meaning/interpretation of things and accompany the emerging potencies in the incomprehensible; dig the forces from the ground; find another way to perceive what there is; live the conflict of coexistence with what is not chosen; change skin.

In the healing ritual: move things around, including you; experience the dimension of inseparability between you and what exists in this space, giving vent to the imaginary field; looking, estrangement, entrancement, transmutation; activate the body’s potencies to be balanced on narrow stones to see the gaps; becoming; interrupt the course to bring out another microscopicpolitical dance; transmute violence; become indiscernible.

In the ritual of instauration: experience the dreamlike dimension of your existence in this space; summon the forces that rename you; escape the traps of the human; move the minimum and the intimate in an ungovernable way; escape the worst; dress yourself as the body you want to be; metamorphose the condition of devoured and devourer; (trans)pose, (trans)figure, (trans)pire; feel your ground, reinvent a history.

We keep drifting, unfolding the idea of ritual. From our concrete cities, our houses and apartments, the idea of holding up the sky has become a way to keep alive our inventive potential and our vitality. We do it microscopically-politically and through the act of imarginating⁹.

Microscopicpolitics, an Invention-Manifesto

Microscopicpolitics, this poetic term that propels this practice, is a provocation to the body as an invitation to pay attention to microscopic forces and existences, invisible or almost invisible. It is a call to perceive in order to cultivate other ways of relating to what is understood as minor, in several senses. According to Erin Manning (2016) in her approach to what she calls the minor gesture, approaching the aspect of the minor does not happen through an understanding of small, but by considering that the minor is a singular agent, among many others. This agent possesses a key for change in the face of its potency for variation. It refers to minor operations that are always happening, which can guide the processes to come, having the power to produce changes in the dimension of the major. It is its continuous variation, its mobility and its rhythms, incapable of being controlled by a preexisting structure, that do not allow its apprehension. On the other hand, the wildness and indeterminacy of the minor may create an association with fragility and lack of rigor. Although these characteristics are understood as weakness, Manning (2016) points out that it is also their strength, because this factor creates space for their interaction with the major chords. By not inhabiting the predetermined, by being “outside of time,” it “invents its own pulse” (Manning, 2016, p. 2). An approach based on the minor invites us to revolve predeterminations, since this almost inapprehensible characteristic that its dynamic entails escapes fixity and demands flux. Therein lies one of the potencies of this provocation to pay attention to the minor, because its intensities and speeds are not easily governed.

A politics of the minor, as Erin Manning (2019) proposes, offers us what sounds like a provocation to bodies that are consonant with an ethic that affirms the potency of life. This politics of the minor calls for a rethinking and a different focus of attention. If we ask ourselves: what would be your greatest minor gesture right now, the most noticeable in you? How does your attention modulate? The space-time dimension, the dimension of things, our dimension as a body - everything is transformed. Microscopicpolitics refers, in this sense, to dimensions with infinite potential for variation on the basis of an investigation that questions the usual modes of attention. The recognition that humans are far from having absolute control over their powers, the potencies of things, and the emergences of encounters can make us more attentive, and possibly more porous, to the dynamic complexity of distinct lives. Such a perspective is based both on the inseparability between body and environment, and on their condition of constant coengendering, marking a process of differentiation.

From this perspective it is possible to affirm that the body is a world - with its dynamics in systematic and complex operation in constant modulation with the environment - and that the world is a body - also with all its inherent complexity, in a process of constant transformation taking into account the different agents in operation, the microscopic and the macroscopic. Even in the face of great differences in intensities, velocities, agencies, body-world and world-body continue in a process of composition and decomposition, as observed in Spinoza’s (2009 [1677]) theory of the affects. By rescaling our idea of this process, departing from the magnitude of the minor, approaches that are more sensitive to compositions and decompositions may find an outlet: from the macrocosm body, to the microcosm world, and vice versa. In this context, the movement goes through a self-immersion, without remaining withdrawn or taciturn in this great universe that has been credited to humans. It is an invitation to dive into the potentialities of encounters and the probability of connecting with the joy of the smallest things.

A situated ethics is the basis of microscopicpolitics. It is also a notion of ethics by which one reverberates in that which is understood by many and vice-versa. If the body is always more than one, as Manning (2015) reiterates in reference to Gilbert Simondon, then why not mobilize the potential of multiplicity, why not accept the displacements that the surprise of the encounter with other bodies offers us? Situated in this research, such an operation involves assuming the interferences between the smaller and the larger, their differences in vibration and possibilities for connection and disconnection that put everything in motion.

Microscopicpolitics refers to an ecology of relations in which the human is not necessarily the center of events and not only subject to them. Things have their agencies. Recognizing them can be a way of attuning ourselves to the actors that exist beyond the human including their varied intensities, speeds, and dimensions (Bennett, 2010). This is a way of operating that goes through the notions of micropolitics and biopolitics that determine the perceptual modes of the body and, consequently, its mode of relation with what is beyond itself. It is a call to move that questions the micropolitical and macropolitical ways in which the human body is disciplined and also disciplines.

In this view, or in this inversion of perspective, the light that highlights human relations is diverted to consider an infinite range of connections that exist beyond an anthropocentric reiteration, of a very special kind that even enables the understanding of others as something at one’s service, as something to be exploited. Viveiros de Castro (2002) is one of the authors who disputes this illusion of a privileged condition of the human being to the detriment of other existences when dealing with Amerindian perspectivism. If the mountain has a mood (Krenak, 2019), if it is possible to summon rain as this worldview reveals, what presence of the human is invoked in this relationship? Certainly a less splintered presence.

“Each human is a heterogeneous compound of wonderfully vibrant, dangerously vibrant matter [...]”, is what he claims (Bennett, 2010, p. 12). The hierarchization between subject and object overshadows the possibility of perceiving the vibration of materialities, which may be related to the understanding of an ecology that involves different modes of existence. Bennett (2010) states that there is a risk present in what has been called the ethical turn, confused with moralizing. In this ethical turn there is a focus on the human that guides the construction of values, which also includes the discussion of environmental issues. How can we deal with environmental issues if there is a continued focus on the human? And furthermore, to what standards of humanity is this discussion subjected?

Manning (2016) questions a formulation of society based on a notion of a neurotypical subject, in reference to work with autistics, and pleads for the recognition of a range of perceptual cognitive processes that are neglected. She attributes to these other processes the activity in a relational field of consciousness, which does not distinguish subject and object, and is therefore more traversed and porous. According to her, choreographic thinking deals with a mode of perception that precedes the categories of experience we are used to describing as perception. This awareness permeates her writing and investigative practice in movement. She questions neurotypicality as the establishment of a white thinking that separates, classifies, and dovetails. As an alternative to a white separation between subject-object: the understanding of an ecology.

Microscopicpolitics rehearses the opportunity to refine the attention to a body-world ecology in co-engendering. Its fusion with the term politics is due to the recognition that, no matter how much we try to escape from an anthropocentric reiteration in favor of more integrated notions, the human is the determining agent of many transformations in the environment in which he or she lives and through which he/she is transformed. The notion of politics, as addressed by Latour (2004), encourages us to think about the ways in which relations take place, taking into account their dissonances and how they produce reverberations in the human and non-human spheres. Thus, we also have politics presented in the sense of the assumption of the reverberations of the smaller in the larger, and vice versa, of the individual in the collective and vice versa, and in relation to how these dynamics occur.

In this sense, attention to the self in a certain way says something about attention to what is beyond the self, to what is mobilized from our presence and the reverberation of affects in us. Caring for the self is caring for the world (Foucault, 2004)¹⁰, not as the production of a wrapping that isolates the body from what is collective, but in the act of assuming the resonances between bodies. Therein lies the opening of space in the body to welcome what is foreign to it: the other. Therein lies the possibility for provoking and establishing other perceptual dynamics. To this end, we have to recognize the ecology that the relations of existence presuppose: the complex operation of co-engendering between bodies-worlds and worlds-bodies in their different dimensions.

Imarginate, a Mode-Invention

Imarginate is another inventive provocation that draws attention to the potencies in the act of imaginating and the marginal operation. Imaginating is perceived here as the possibility of producing images of sensations, as mapping and mobilization of the affections in the body, beyond its more common meaning that relates it to the immersion in the fantastic universe, production of images as movement and creation of environment¹¹.

Imarginate is an invitation to produce other realities in the mobilization of affects and of a field of virtualities. It is a call to activate inventiveness and to make the invented present. This is one of the potencies that the marginal operation allows: the culture of life in diverse and unfocused instances, circumscribing the issue, the affects, the events, and finding ways of being in tune with the expansion of vitality. The act of bordering - as in following the course of a river - can trigger another temporality in the bodies, perhaps even one more in tune with the many existences beyond the human. Operating on the edges can be a learning process about restraining the imperative of protagonism and producing other imaginaries of the encounter when negotiating with the sinuosities of the path and the forces present there. As a body in an operation of co-engendering, it can phagocytize the forces that spread out from the edges, gain a world, create alliances with the other existences without its immediate apprehension. Incidentally, the edge may not be as small as one might think; it may extend over kilometers, continentally, unmarking territories named in the process of colonizing plunder. To imarginate is to use that which borders and the marginal condition to interrogate the limits. It is to give vent to the potentialities that we usually don’t know we have. The body of the margin carries the revolution in itself.

Inhabiting the margin may be a way to pay attention to the almost inapprehensible vibratory potency of the minor, or in connection with Bennett’s (2010) words, to the perception of the existence of things that do not even gain the status of a thing. This thing - a type of matter - can be understood as something on the fringe of what is immediately perceived, but has a vitality that impacts the bodies. Hence a possible mapping that goes through the production of images of sensations. This inhabiting may be an act of swimming against the current, because for Bennett (2010), the image of dead or completely instrumentalized matter feeds our destructive fantasies of land, conquest, and consumption. She ventures to say that there is a certain purpose in this: that of preventing us from detecting a fuller range of non-human potencies. These powers circulate around and within human bodies. Bennett (2010) argues that there is a natural tendency to the way things are. She further asserts that if we humans tune in to a logic of turbulence, another human and political stance can have an outlet. It is by inhabiting turbulence that the marginal operates, and it is by piercing the choreopolice (Lepecki, 2011) that the marginal institutes another urban choreography. It is through a marginal dynamic that art penetrates the bodies.

As Spinoza (2009 [1677]) states, no one knows what the body can do, and as humans we engage in the act of grasping some of its possibilities. The situated inventory of what the human and the non-human can do together is also an opening to the inventive field. In the proposition of imarginate there is an explicit invitation to accompany the potencies that become evident in the inseparability between body and environment, going through the perception of their (il)limitations and their strengths. In this sense, to imarginate becomes a mobilizing act of that which seems almost invisible in oneself and in the world, and as a way of producing other (im)possible images. From the margin, it is a call for the reparation of agencies and emergences among magnitudes and insignificances in unstoppable action: those that act in us; those that we perform; and those that happen beyond us, considering the different manifestations of forces. Finally, this practice is an invitation to our perceptive arsenal to set our microscopic-political potencies to dance.

Considerations

The initial proposal of the CPP_Implicações project was to make room for research into dance and performance in order to problematize the model of society we comprise. One way of doing so until then had been to mobilize within us the affections we have experienced. It was not an initial intention that this event in art - its propositions/provocations and the performative sharing of those affections - would create a field of attendance in attention to the minimal and marginal. We spent the entire year of 2020 clinging to the canvases in search of keeping alive the microrevolutions that the collective dynamic plants in us on a daily basis. We could say that one of them is the discovery of the potential for intimate and public transformations in the flow of our potencies. The microscopicpolitics is activated there, in this intensity that is felt, but with a blurred aspect and without much opportunity for apprehension, which changes something in us, something in the impermanence, in the outflow of fluids, and in the touching of our wounds. We don’t know how to name it, or describe it in words, but we intuitively perceive, and as a body learning to be sensitive, that it is the provocation of our forces. These forces make up a universe of other vibrant forces as Bennett (2010) urges us to recognize.

Seeking to tune in to the vibrations, properties, and possibilities of the different existences - the human and non-human ones that comprise the environment and that compose us - is not a learning process laden with prescriptive modes. This learning is to be invented and its clues do not appear only in the main pathways. Maybe it is precisely about inhabiting an opposite side of the already existing modes, inhabiting the not knowing, the not seeing. Perhaps it is necessary to silence the narrative restlessness for a while, even the desire for immediate receptive mapping, the making of maps and their limiting cartographic compound. Perhaps it is an infinite learning that takes place in the subtleties, in the greatness, in the velocities and intensities of the minor and the marginal that can expand our so limited perceptive arsenal.

And what about art? Art has a lot to do with this, because its field and its mode of existence is the sensitive. To imarginate is artistic and political, for it provokes the habits of perceiving. The refinement of perception demands a cultivation of attention in its infinite possibilities of suspensions (Kastrup, 2007). A constant encountering of the margin, the imprecise, the unpredictable, and the act of making images of what appears as an improbable (even impossible) connection can reveal itself as fertile ground. The experience in art can carve space in the sensory-motor-emotional apparatus, can provoke a musculature that becomes more flexible and sufficiently taut as it is summoned. Nothing is guaranteed or predictable, but it is probable. Modulating and scaling attention to smaller, marginal operations can be an anti-brutalizing, anti-sensory numbing vaccine. In its processes of incidence and sensitive articulation of/on/with the body-world.

This project has unfolded as an investigation and sharing of more resilient ways of making an art of resistance in end-of-world times. It has an outflow in the exercise of putting in motion the diverse potencies, in a microscopic dance that takes place in sensitive connection with different existences, being able to reach the national congress or other galaxies, to make other worlds. This dance demands an implication of the body in the constant triggering of the question: what can the body do? And speaking of its potentialities, imagining is one of them, and to imarginate is a poetic way of activating them, calling on us politically and ethically to take a position, from the place we inhabit, from the minimal and infinitesimal that our movement represents in the face of the world’s grandiosity and fractality.

Notes

• 1
  In the Portuguese version there is a slight change in some words that follow with the inflection in the feminine before the masculine and the inclusion of gender neutral inflection as a stance contrary to the hegemonic and chauvinistic logic, also supported by the argument raised by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (2010) on the place of speech of subalternized bodies. In the English translation, this option was not fully contemplated due to the characteristics of the language itself.
• 2
  In a preceding process, Michele Schiocchet, Paloma Bianchi and I, researched some references and mobilized distinct rituals in the collective Mapas e Hipertextos <https://mapasehipertextos.wordpress.com/>. We accessed writings more related to the field of sacred rituals, we went through witchcraft manuals, writings by Carlos Castaneda, Alejandro Jodorowsky and we realized that we were operating more in the field of profanation, in the way Agamben (2007) refers to.
• 3
  This link shows a file containing a compilation of the propositions/provocations sent during 2020: <https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OvlZbntSetkvNO1MagRmpDg82SsH1lsX/view?usp=sharing>.
• 4
  The following links show a compilation of images taken by Michele Schiocchet: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIJyR03T938>; <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_1KKq_qM2A>.
• 5
  Page available at: <https://www.instagram.com/projeto_cpp_implicacoes/>. Accessed on: 02 May, 2021.
• 6
  For further information, consult: <http://www.fluxus.org/>. Accessed on: 01 May, 2021.
• 7
  More markedly since the year 2013 with the fueling of a suspicion of fraud in the presidential elections, the consequences becoming more evident after the impeachment process of President Dilma Rousseff in 2016 and the presidential elections of 2018, culminating in a catastrophic administration.
• 8
  This provocation is in attention to the discussion raised by Alva Noë (2004) about active perception. Noë (2004) states that perceiving is a way of acting and not something that happens to us or in us, but something similar to touch. In her view, it is through physical movement and interaction that the world becomes available to those who observe it, and this perceptual capacity is also determined by our bodily abilities, by what we do or know how to do. By posing the problem of a limited perception, I am referring to the stimuli that we experience and that collaborate with the creation of perceptual tools in us. The ways of perceiving are influenced by the dynamics that we go through.
• 9
  In the current phase, in the year 2021, we turn to processing the records and creating performances for future sharing on an interactive website. This phase adds another layer to the process that concerns the relationship between act and registry.
• 10
  Focusing on the relationships among humans and based on Greek culture, Foucault (2004) addresses this issue of self-care in an expanded, collective way, emphasizing that, in face of the complexity inherent to relationships, self-care is caring for others. To this discussion, the practice of freedom is added as a less individualistic autonomy, since, enslaved to their own appetites, humans begin to impose their desires and fantasies on others.
• 11
  When discussing images as events that take place in the body, Bittencourt (2012, p. 30) recalls the imbricated relationship between image production and the environment: “[...] images are actions of the body, as the brain modifies the body, which modifies the brain, which modifies the environment and is modified by it”. Her approach with reference to neuroscience does not expand the discussion of imagination as a producer of images, however, when we expand the creation of images linked to a more diffuse universe, which takes into account a variation inherent to the undisciplined and relatively ungovernable processes of neuronal connections in relation to their stimuli, it is possible to say that the relationship between the process of image production, as a body, and imagination are quite close.
• This original text, translated by Tony O’Sullivan, is also published in Portuguese in this issue of the journal.

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Edited by

Editor-in-charge: Gilberto Icle

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  24 Sept 2021
• Date of issue
  2021

History

• Received
  31 Jan 2021
• Accepted
  06 July 2021