Jeffrey Gormly, editor@choreograph.net
‘The mind organises the world by organising itself’ (Piaget)
‘Movement is the mother of all cognition: it forms the I that moves before the I that moves forms movement’ (Jaana Parviainen)
jg: I arrive here by link and curiosity. My affinity for the project hooks me in. My natural ability to write and edit kicks in. Isn’t this is how the world gets made? I contribute a hypertext of my own thoughts, montages and megamixes….
jg: It strikes me that we work here as a swarm :
relation is [the] rule
swarm is an organization of multividuals with some relation to one another, acting and self-transforming a pattern that is more than any sum of its parts;
swarm exists in an ecology of mind, where dynamic telepathinking agents self-organize a state of fundapendence;
volatile, unpredictable, unstable, swarm is power of imagineering, speaking in one and many voices, and acting out truth; relation and cooperation telepathinks a commons: overlapping tastes, experiences, and boundaries;
swarm is a dynamic phenomenon,
always exists in time
and, as such, is always acting,
interacting,
interrelating,
and self-transforming:
a tension between pattern and purpose
tension between collectivity and connectivity
swarm only arises from localized, singular, heterogeneous actions of individual units. this does not mean that swarm prioritizes group over individual. swarm exists at a third level, where multiplicity and relation intersect:
self-organization as emergence of a global pattern from localized interactions.
in swarm there is no central command, no unit or agent which is able to survey, oversee and control entire swarm . yet actions of swarm are directed, movement motivated, and pattern has purpose
-remix of Networks, Swarms, Multitudes (Part Two) by Eugene Thacker, originally published on ctheory.net
jg: And the swarm is working like this:
…montage – the juxtaposition of dissimilars such that old habits of mind can be jolted into new “essays, spread over thirty-five years, combine to propose a new way of thinking about ideas and about those aggregates of perceptions of the obvious. ideas which I call “minds”. This way of thinking I call the “ecology of mind”, or the ecology of ideas.” “The individual mind is …one of the very weapons which could resist, if not destroy, intellectual colonization and violence. immanent but not only in the body. It is immanent also in pathways and messages outside the body; and there is a larger Mind ...the effect of all good montage, of which the individual mind is only a subsystem.” “Aldous Huxley used to say that the central problem for humanity is the quest.. to shock patterns of connections into quite different patterning, for grace. … I argue that art is a part of man’s quest for grace; … I shall argue that the problem of grace is fundamentally capturing what Stanley Mitchells calls in this regard the infinite, problem of integration and that what is to be integrated is the diverse parts of the mind- especially those multiple levels of sudden or subterranean connections of dissimilars, which one extreme is called “consciousness” and the other the “unconsciousness”.”
catching our breath …
Michael Taussig, The Nervous System / Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind
jg: What is mental health for a person?
These ideas are a start:
This is a fundamentally creative activity, and a lifetime’s work.
Also: ‘Mental health’ is not a finite state, or even attitude, it is a process. It is the process of learning to master the three abilities above. One never achieves this mastery: progress, not perfection…
More: I suggest that this process can not be conducted in a vacuum. I propose therefore that we think of mental health as a distributed, emergent, relational phenomenon. It arises in a system where each person’s own process is supported by their interactions with others, and by consciously crafted spaces/processes that hold, contain, and support these processes.
So mental health is actually a property of a system. It is both the person’s dance of the perceptual imagination, and the system’s choreography of support.
I believe that as people concerned with producing a better state of affairs for the mental health of our people, and ourselves, it would be most profitable to consider this a question of ecology
How should human society be structured; what form should it take now?
… That alone would be ecology if we could grasp this ecological question at its root… Ecology goes further, reaches further, and relates to the social organism’s capacity for life
Joseph Beuys, What is Art?
jg: The question that occupies my mind is that of multi-authorship in a re-writable reality:
the desire is to discover a container that will accommodate working ideas of a group of people, entitling sovereignty and autonomy (=authorship) to each person’s train of thought, while also facilitating movement within and between:
jg: Come over here for a little think-in
We’re planning a party for social living...
jg: To be or not to bop in a movement of the people.
My idea is logical. Its a party and it is political.
Political party. Energy body.
Matter is a stage:
Events happen through me,
An actor, performing facts of reality.
Control of creative capacity for change
Is engine of true freedom.
Our goal is autonomous self-creation,
Seeking flexibility and permanessence,
Distributing non-interference,
Striving for sustainable complex formations,
And total participation.
jg: Think: economics of communication,
Rewritable thought formations
Traveling at speed of change towards supersonality.
Multi-authorship in a rewritable reality.
Be conceiving what you are, and then be-living it,
Our world is where our two worlds meet.
Whole thing is a dreamcatcher, what politics should be:
Dance of chance and dreams with resistance of reality.
Ideas play out human dramas.
Emanations of utopia...
jg: It’s about energy:
Ideas in motion, movement of the people, on a stage, on a dancefloor
Intensity, performance, we can act ourselves better.
I believe in a sort of supersonality:
Onstage is a whole new reality,
And what is a party, political party,
Only a capacity for change
And a chance to play it for real.
Don’t you see how it works?:
We can all be auteurs,
It’s about communication, not power….
jg: Here I point you to three essential essays, published in Framemakers: Choreography As An Aesthetics Of Change and online here:
http://choreograph.net/articles/lead-article-choreography-as-an-aesthetics-of-change
http://choreograph.net/articles/lead-article-dance-as-a-metaphor-for-thought
http://choreograph.net/articles/lead-article-social-dreaming-social-choreography
Michael Klien and Steve Valk propose a new way of thinking/sensing that joins the dots between the dancing body and the social body, dancing as another way of doing thinking, aesthetics and art as a fundamental organising principle of consciousness, and new ways of making art that actually address the relationship between the person and the gear-stick of the way things are.. Do you get me? Art that puts your hand on the control stick of everything because it puts you in touch with the equation between how we see, how we perceive, how we explain, and how things come to be:
from Dance As A Metaphor For Thought
Steve Valk: In the 1930’s the anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson went to the island of Bali and made a film of the “Barong” a 6 hour-long dance / theater ritual in which the whole village participates. This ceremonial “play” is only performed when there is trouble or disharmony, when the dead are seen walking through the village at night etc... The costumes are lavish, the various roles are meticulously rehearsed, the choreographies are precise and are taught at an early age. What is fascinating about the film is that suddenly, in the middle of the performance, some of the young dancers go into a trance – they fall over, shake violently etc... The trance then seems to spread like wildfire overtaking other performers and even a few audience members. Some of the male dancers take their knives and try to stab themselves. Concerned audience members immediately jump on top of them to prevent self-inflicted injury. At this point, the film narrator explains that this state of disruption is precisely what the Barong is meant to induce. The enactment of the ritual ceremony or “performance” is all in preparation for the moment when it will break down and fall apart.
For it is in this state of emotional and situational conflagration that “the Gods have arrived”. In the midst of the mayhem, this outburst of chaos, the village priest or shaman sets up his ceremonial apparatus and begins to commune, to burn offerings, to address the village troubles.
Indigenous Psychologies of the Self
Cultures that emphasize firm boundaries and high personal control tend to view the self as exclusionary or “self-contained”. Fluid boundary, strong field-control cultures view the self as “ensembled”, meaning that the self is inclusive of other individuals.
(reading from E. Martin Walker’s essay ”Experiences in Social Dreaming”)
Michael Klien: What I would say about the Balinese dance ceremony is that “a psychic structure” would seem to be the prime mover of the piece and that the bodies themselves are not discreet units but they become “caught up in” another kind of structuring process. Of course these bodies correspond or overlap with “individual selves”, but during the course of the ceremony, these very same bodies are drawn into a different organizing pattern or constellation. The unknowing participants become enmeshed in a wider communicational field or “psychic structure”.
STRANGE CURRENTS OF A SITUATION
On the subject of mind / body relations, the anthropologist Gregory Bateson has a profound and revolutionary theory. He describes six formative steps, that I won’t go into at this point, that lead to the creation of what he calls “Mind”. Mind according to Bateson’s understanding, is a certain constellation of a system that is able to retain information. Therefore, a Mind could consist of non-living elements, like a traffic system, or be composed of many organisms, like a school of fish.
It may function for brief, as well as extended, periods of time and is not necessarily defined by a fixed or firm boundary like skin. If a Mind should have consciousness, then this consciousness is always only partial. Bradford Keeney, a psychologist and admirer of Bateson, has called the mind a ‘conversational pattern’ and bodies “the participants in the conversation.” Each of these kinds of “bodies” also functions as a Mind, in the Batesonion sense, and is engaged in larger conversational patterns with other bodies, which in turn, constitute larger aggregates of Mind.
NON-SYMMETRIC STATES OF STABLE EQUILIBRIUM
Steve Valk: So one cannot escape the fact that, at least in systems-theoretical terms, there is no distinction between mind and body. Across all fields, all levels are linked. The formal, highly-ritualized Balinese performance reaches a critical state at which a kind of rupture of the symbolic order takes place. At the point where the “the gods arrive” there is a radical almost brutal moment of perceptual re-patterning. Bateson associates this phenomenon with something he calls “kinesthetic socialization,” a means by which individuals are prepared for altered consciousness, for a “temporary escape from the ego-organized world.” The Balinese ritual performance could be seen then as an enactment of Mind, an example of the organism called “village” and its capacity to process and respond to information in a self-corrective way. After thechaos, the psychic hurricane, a recalibrated “rejuvenated” pscho-social configuration emerges.
jg: from Radical Constructivism by Ernst Von Glasersfeld:
Our understanding of such a universe comes not from discovering its present appearance, but in remembering what we originally did to bring it about. (Spencer Brown, 1973)
What we ordinarily call reality is the domain of the relatively durable perceptual and conceptual structurres which we manage to establish, use, and maintain in the flow of our actual experience. This experiential reality, no matter what epistemology we want to adopt, does not come to us in one piece. We build it up bit by bit in a succession of steps that, in retrospect, seem to form a succession of levels. Repetition is an indispensable factor in that development. Without repetition there would be no reason to claim that a given item has any permanence beyond the context of present experience. Only if we consider an experience to be the second instance of the self-same item we have experienced before, does the notion of permanent things arise. This creation of 'individual identity' has momentous consequences. If two experiences that we want to consider experiences of one and the same item do not immediately succeed one another, then we must provide a way for that item to survive. That is to say, we are obliged to think of that individual item as subsisting somewhere while we are attending to others in the flow of our experience. Thus we come to construct 'existence' as a condition or state of 'being' that takes place outside our experiential field; and the things that partake of this existence need space in which to be and time in order to perdure while our attention is elsewhere. In other words, by creating individual identities which we can repeat in our experience, we have created a fully furnished independent world that exists whether or not we experience its furniture.
“What then remains is a construction as such, and one sees no ground why it should be unreasonable to think that it is the ultimate nature of reality to be in continual construction instead of consisting of an accumulation of ready-made structures.” (Piaget, 1970)
jg: PERSONAL STATEMENT:
if reality is indeed in continual construction, then a primary task of human being is to become conscious of that act of construction and turn it into an art
jg: what is choreonautics? http://choreograph.net/raw/choreonautics
A new discipline, inhabited and developed by those who dance with one foot inside and one outside a system
Choreography (v.): the arrangement of bodies in time and space
Choreography (v.): the arrangement of relations between bodies in time and space
Choreography (v.): the framing of relations between bodies ……… ‘a way of seeing the world’
Choreography (n.): the result of these actions
Choreography (n.): ‘a dynamic constellation of any kind, consciously created or not, self-organising or super-imposed.’
Choreography (n.): ‘order observed…, exchange of forces…, a process that has an observable or observed embodied order’
Choreography (v.): the act of witnessing such an order
Choreography (v.): the act of interfering with or negotiating such an order
Michael Klein and Jeffrey Gormly, What is Choreography
Choreonauts are bodies moving in time and space, witnessing, framing, interfering with and negotiating dynamic constellations of which they themselves are also a part, even if only by virtue of their role as observers.
Choreonauts rely on creative intuition to dissolve dualities of subject and object, and resolve multiply-framed partial images of a systemic whole (which is unknowable by we subjects) into working hypotheses we may call choreographies of thought or action.
choreonautics is being both dancer, dance and choreographer at one same time, or in a fluid continuum…
Matter is a stage: Energy body.
Events happen through me,
Acting reality.
Choreonauts operate in a context of communication, not power and dance across a topography of networks and relations. Communication is key: it is a fundamental of economics, creativity, politics and play. It is a basis for any construction of reality that desires corroboration. It is a dynamic at heart of perception, organisation and negotiation of worldviews.
Choreonauts integrate roles of shaman/king/priest/politician and other/savage/scapegoat/animal into self as shaManimal and move beyond representation into a domain of pure performance
jg: What more can I say… so much more, but time presses my flesh. Join me at choreograph.net, specifically inside raw thinking/notes towards a flexistential cookbook, where I explore these questions, and others, such as
What is civic immune system?
[civic] immune system: a kind of metaphor.
society itself is a structure that is meant to resist the emergence of the state
…notion of a centralized government in the brain fades away, to be replaced by a more interactive and analogous organization…
[civic] immune system: a floating brain
a state of grace …what is to be integrated is the diverse parts of the mind
[civic] immune system: “a self-referential, positive assertion of a coherent unity”.
Swarms of immune cells interact with swarms of nerve cells in maintaining the somatic ecology.
[civic] immune system: mobile extension of brain into body
forever engaged in the mirror room of redefinitions
anewsubjectivity :
[civic] immune system: communitas
can induce stability into a cellular political network of self-regulating distributed non-interference
ie homeofluxus
by flexistential means
ie a poetic morpho-social semiosphere dreaming (a body)
projecting a future that moves forward into itself to centre on itself in a recurrent recursive choreography of learning
jg: PERSONAL STATEMENT:
Perhaps the destabilization of institutions, decomposition of traditional forms of reference, and deconstruction of heretofore unshakable first principles about the human condition|situation will thoroughly vitalize our species’ creative effort, and send the discipline of dance shooting into a completely new orbital path. Soon, dancers and philosophers, scientists and other pattern makers, actors and social choreographers, science fictioneers, imagineers, will begin to work together to mend our broken perceptual apparatus and devise wholly new ways of seeing and being in this world|s. All efforts will be predicated on aesthetic principles, movement and change will be the rule. This golden age of choreonautics will grow new humans who surf cosmic forces at work in our reality, negotiating a future as they are being born, simultaneously observing and inhabiting a communicational matrix we live by|in|through. It’s time to start playing for real…
jg: a final direction: what is social dreaming?
‘The purpose of social dreaming matrix is to transform the thinking in the dreams offered to the matrix, by means of free association, and to become available to new thought.’
Participants gather in a broken spiral/snowflake configuration and offer their own dreams to the matrix. These dreams form a matrix by which the participants, individually and as a collective, may enter into the unconscious or infinite and work with raw thinking material that may not be otherwise available to them. Once placed in the matrix, dreams and free associations become part of a web of meaning, and cannot be traced back to whom offered them. Thus the matrix is an intimate but safe experience of creativity and meaning making, a kind of yoga for the artists inside everyone, and a means of discovering the unthought knowns of a particular situation.
http://choreograph.net/articles/the-social-dreaming-phenomenon
http://choreograph.net/articles/dream-intelligence-tapping-conscious-and-non-attended-sources-of-intelligence-in-organizations
http://choreograph.net/articles/theatre-of-dreams-social-dreaming-as-ritualyogaliterature-machine
What is Social Dreaming?
Social dreaming seeks to explore what the dream may be communicating about the social and political context of the dreamer. There is a sharing of dreams, and then meaning is expanded and developed through association, amplification, and systemic thinking in an attempt to give voice to the echoes of thought that exist in the space between individual minds and the shared environment.[1]
Working hypotheses:
Dreaming is one way of doing thinking.
A group of people gathered together for a purpose constitute a system, or mind, hivemind. We work in organization as social systems, representing the whole community including its past, present and potential.
There is a social purpose for dreams as well as a personal significance for the dreamer.
The social system can put dreams to work by offering the dreams to social dreaming matrix, using free association to make connections and find links between the dreams. The focus is on the dream and not the dreamer.
The matrix (from Latin for ‘uterus’) is a container from which something grows. It is also extremely receptive.
Why social dreaming?
Social dreaming is a way of cultivating an ecology of mind, and an awareness of this ecology.
Social dreaming is a means by which this social organism can be sensed. It is a means of collectively exercising the new organs of perception that Joseph Beuys believed was necessary to become beings capable of carrying evolution forward
Because we are working with the primal creative force within us, ie dream, we are simultaneously endowing that ecology of mind with a creative life, in a form of social sculpture:
A ‘supreme ethical rule [is] to elicit the best in oneself and others by drawing out the unique difference that constitutes each self… Characteristic of the ethical attitude is the painting, and constant retouching, of ideal portraits of our fellow humans and ourselves and acting toward them, and ourselves, in accordance with those portraits.’[2]
Social Dreaming is democratic and safe, receptive and productive.
It allows for a multiverse of meanings. It is possible to produce truth, in multiple forms, without the need for a ‘master’. It is a choreography for participatory democracy that does not require consensus or agreement. A suspension of already available answers makes a space for new thinking possible.
The action of Social Dreaming is one of communal meaning making.
The artist, the poet must in some sense set the world free to have a new go at its business… If our given experience is a labyrinth, then its impassability is countered by the poet’s imagining some equivalent of the labyrinth and bringing himself and the reader through it.[3]
Social dreaming matrix can be understood to be a collectively imagined equivalent of the labyrinth of our experience or present situation, through which we bring ourselves to an ‘expanded common sense’.
[1] Helen Morgan, The Social Dreaming Matrix
[2] A Concept Map for Ethical Culture: Towards Philosophical Consensus - A statement of the National Leaders Council of the American Ethical Union
[3] Seamus Heaney, The Redress of Poetry
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