Text, Dance, and Time

Metaphysics & Epistemology
1

The sign is sacred by its very nature. The first human being who managed to depict a mammoth in ochre on the wall of a cave, apparently, experienced a powerful existential shock. This shock was connected with the suspicion that the sign contains the soul of the object and allows one, as it were, to gain power over that object. It is not hard to imagine our ancestors, inspired, throwing spears at the image of a buffalo before the hunt.

But at the same time, a deep suspicion toward the sign also arises, and then toward text. Text, the sign, in essence, removes power itself from bodily temporality. After all, speech is still bodily. It is largely connected with bodily power. The voice contains rhythm and tempo, as well as purely physiological traces, which may be young, sexual, old, or sick. Voice and speech are still too bodily, while the cries of animals speak of direct corporeality: the voice usually serves as a warning, a threat, or a mating signal. The sign, the symbol, the text — are something different. Speech is, to a greater extent, lived through. Whereas the sign exists only in its own temporality. The temporality of the sign is not continuous, not in the moment, but discrete. The sign exists only at the moment of reading. Despite the presence of a physical medium, in the case of the sign this medium is secondary. Speech is always connected with the one who speaks, and its meaning changes because of that. The sign, however, is fully preserved in transfer.

I think it was precisely this mode of existence of the sign — in another temporality — that provoked horror, suspicion, and ensured its sacredness.

Perhaps the best available way to study this temporality is through religions. Judaism, as far as I understand it, is the principal text-oriented religion. It is the place where the sign is sacred to the highest degree. I think the consequence of this is the rupture between Creator and creature. God created the sign and transmitted it to man in a non-human reality. The Kabbalists developed these ideas, and the teaching of Kabbalah is, in many ways, an investigation of the connection between the sign and divine light, the teaching of the shattered vessels. What matters here is not the teaching of Kabbalah itself, but the very existence of an archetypal mode of working with text. In the Abrahamic religions, the world was created by the Word — the Logos — and the Word was God.

It is important to note that text-orientation in the Abrahamic religions, which in turn have different modes of working with text, sharply separates text from image. Possibly because of the latter’s physical embodiment.

Text has no medium, whereas an image, an idol, a sculpture already ties the sign to physical embodiment. Text is completely independent of its medium, whereas a copy of a painting or a sculpture is no longer the same painting or sculpture.

On the other hand, one can find a deep suspicion toward text among the ancient Greeks. This is the attitude described by Derrida: text is less complete than speech. A book cannot replace communication with a teacher.

By contrast, one can recall the attitude toward text in the East. In Hinduism, the world is created in the dance of the god Shiva.

Dance, unlike the sign, is fundamentally unreproducible. Dance signifies only itself. An image of dance does not transmit the dance. A sign does not transmit the dance. Dance is not fully contained either in memory or in video recording.

Dance, through rhythmic movements, is accessible even to animals. The relatives of dance are patterns, music, and birdsong. Here one can note that we find the mating coloration of birds — the tails of peacocks — aesthetically attractive, although it was not intended for us.

On the other hand, the tradition of Indian dance also acquires sacred meaning: myths and legends were transmitted through dances. Dances acquired elements of a sign system.

This suggests that God is already present in the world — bodily. The temporality of the sacred and the profane are not identical, but they are similar. God does not exist outside time — in many respects, God, or more precisely his dance, is time itself. In the Hindu tradition, the bearer of the sacred text cannot be a physical medium. Originally, it could be preserved and transmitted only by spiritually enlightened people — the Brahmins. The reason is the same: the sacredness of the text must unfold and be sustained by a bearer existing in time.

It is also interesting how text is connected with history. In the Abrahamic religions, time unfolds in history: the sacredness of religion rests on historical events. Text-oriented religions view time as an arrow. Whereas for Hinduism, time is rather a cycle.

1 Like
2

Labanotation is like music notation for dancers. It preserves the identity of a dance so that it can be reproduced in different performances.

Some hip-hop moves signify robots. Cakewalk is a vintage dance based on parody. Many dance moves signify by mimicry or gestures such as a greeting.

Right, they refer to the dance, and reference is asymmetric.

3

This can be challenged quite easily if we compare a ballet performance in person with its symbolic notation. Or, even more simply, if we compare the notation of a dance with dancing with a woman.

A dance matters not as a notation, but as the movement of a particular body in a particular time and situation. What is preserved in notation is at best a formal identity, not the living event of the dance itself.

1 Like
4

Some intriguing thoughts here. But:

This is the traditional, poorly translated version of the Greek New Testament. “Logos” in Greek is multi-dimensional, and refers to reason, logic, or underlying structure as often as it does to a literal, textual word. To many scholars, the opening of the Johannine gospel is better understood in this way. What was “in the beginning” was “the way it is,” the Tao, the structure of reality, divine reason – not a text.

The interesting question – on which I’m no expert – is why the Greek language displays such a deep bond between the two senses of “logos.”

2 Likes
5

Notation is not supposed to preserve a performance.

Labanotation preserves the identity of a choreography, not a performance of it.

In music, a score preserves the identity of a composition (not a performance). That’s how Mozart’s music is preserved and reproduced in different performances.

A vintage dance is typically shared and learned by practice or by watching videos of old performances. Eventually it will change and disappear.

1 Like
6

This is how I tend to understand the situation. Each us enacts a piece of God. These visceral-flowing pieces of God are entangled, and that’s the world.

I still call myself an atheist to avoid confusion, as I don’t believe in a god that is outside of the world. The world itself, as Time, is a “dancing God.”

I’m also shamelessly “phonocentric” in the sense of insisting on the “incarnation” of meaning. Your use of “dance” is even better in some ways, for dance is more obviously visceral than phonemes.

1 Like
7

Great theme, these opposed visions of the ramp ( or the arrow ) and the wheel. Joyce gives us a text of the wheel in Finnegans Wake. The wheel spins forever without perfect repetition. There is something to almost remember and something to almost paraphrase for those who come after who are almost ourselves again.

8

Nice! I take this as not from ‘incarnation to incarnation’, that is not “eternal recurrence” of identity but as ‘from moment to moment’ recurrence of difference and different degrees of sameness.

1 Like
9

I sort of take it in both ways. For instance, people who think “almost like us” on this issue will come after us. And they will think “almost like us” because they will ( almost ) agree with what you say above, just as I do. This “almost” is an expression of the erupting novelty that “spreads us out” in the space of personality and makes language irreducibly ambiguous.

10

Yes, in that framing the “almost like us” makes sense. Nietzsche’s idea, where the recurrence of life, due to the assumption of strict determinism, is understood to be exactly the same, fails to hold if indeterminism is admitted. And further, assuming indeterminism, there would be no necessary recurrence of individuals and conditions anyway, and all the more so due to the locality of temporality―that is the non-existence of universal time..

Just as no two oak leaves are exactly the same, so the ever “erupting novelty” ensures that we need not worry about rebirth. Actually the idea of rebirth and karma is itself based on a strict notion of causality, that is it depends on determinism, even if that idea is “flipped” in the idea that there is conventional truth and ultimate truth. But as Zyporyn says the ultimate truth is that there is no difference between conventional truth and ultimate truth―Nirvana is Samsara.

I see it as being a bit like Kant, where he asserts the “principle of sufficient reason” as holding necessarily in the empirical context, yet becoming incoherent in the non-context ‘context’ of the “in itself”.

The weird thing about the idea of karma and rebirth is that it inconsistently understands the causal necessity of the empirical or lifeworld context as somehow magically “holding over” from life to life, from life to death to rebirth―which seems to be an idea basing itself on a kind of category error―a failure to acknowledge context.

11

I like the introduction of determinism, which I wasn’t thinking about initially. If you look at elementary cellular automata, finite deterministic systems, then you can start from states (“garden of Eden states”) that you can never get back to. The system — as finite and deterministic — will always get stuck in a loop. Reality as a whole would be hard to understand as exactly repeating without identifying it with a mathematical expression. Perhaps those appropriately impressed by Newtonian physics “shrugged off” the deep mysteries of the real number system and contemplated a universe contracting and expanding forever, but still within an immense cycle, still eventually exactly repeating.

But neither of us seems to find a perfect repetition plausible. And determinism is a kind of “crystallization” of expectation into necessity. I very much “feel” the law-like-ness of nature, so the “problem of induction” points at something strange, that we “can’t help” but to project the past on the future to some degree. We just “filter” that past — separating correlation from “causation” — and project it more carefully.

Good point about “universal time” being taken for granted in classic determinism. Basically the philosopher is tempted by determinism and its dark beauty because “everything has really already happened.” I recall Nietzsche suggesting that it restored the innocence of the world. The “evil” people “had no choice” and are perfectly and eternally integrate in a system that includes the “good.” All have their place in a stormy music whose end was tacit in its beginning.

12

Right. We need not fear rebirth ( as a cruel fate) or death (as a cruel fate). We are and are not born, and we do and do not die. It’s all in the ambiguity of the “I” referring to a singular being who is also largely “constituted” by (the radiance of) signs that are more “we” than “me.”

I agree with Zyporyn (or with what I have no choice to personally appropriate from those signs.) Nirvana is samsara, grasped perhaps in a new way that overcomes the alienation inherent in projecting nirvana elsewhere. To me this is also Heraclitus. The being of the river is here and not here. The “river in itself” is wet with many waters and with no water in particular.

I take that principle to point at the nature of understanding, but it fails when one tries to explain the total fact. For there is nothing to explain that total fact in terms of. Explanation is intra-worldly.

Yeah I could never make sense of one creature’s existence as a punishment for another’s by their being somehow the same creature. Instead I understand reincarnation ( without the karma) as a metaphor for the approximate repetition of the human situation and its types. Here is “another poet” who is yet singular in manifesting that archetype. The archetype is not “other than” its participants, and its participants even “bend” the archetype as they show up. This is how I understand Derrida on signs. No “atemporal meaning” but a drifting in their sense in an unpredictable future.

We might even divide philosophers into those who do and do not acknowledge a genuine future in terms of genuine novelty. Yet philosophers can’t help but to try to constrain this novelty. The “form” of all possible experience is their fundamental poem.

14

Ah yes, Derrida calls it logocentrism, the privileging of speech over writing, the assumed immediacy of the voice over the sign, the physical over the virtual, the embodied over the textual. It is the faith in the origin, the ground, that which is purely present to itself, pure self-identical repetition. The traditional objection of philosophy to writing is that whenever we record a living meaning, we lose control over its interpretation.

In order to communicate our intentions to someone who is not present, to posterity, we must pas down our knowledge via signs which are designed to function in our absence, but they always run the risk of distorting our intended meaning. But Derrida argues that this opposition between the supposed directness, immediacy and undistorted meaningfulness of speech (or the ‘inner’ voice of thinking to myself) and the mediacy of written signs is no opposition at all.

Instead, all intention, all ‘meaning-to-say’, all thought in its supposed direct and pure presence to itself, is already divided within itself by alterity, delay, contamination by an outside. He calls this contamination within presence ‘writing’. By this he does not mean literally writing things down. He means that when we think or say something, we always say something more or other than what we intended to say.

This is true of all spoken and written language, and all other sorts of gestures and markings which intend meaning. Even as it is designed to be immortal, repeatable as the same apart from any actual occurrences made at some point, the SENSE of a spoken or inscribed utterance, what it means or desires to say, is always tied to the contingencies of empirical circumstance. Derrida explains:

Iterability makes possible idealization-and thus, a certain identity in repetition that is independent of the multiplicity of factual events- while at the same time limiting the idealization it makes possible:broaching and breaching it at once…the possibility of its being repeated another time-breaches, divides, expropriates the “ideal” plenitude or self-presence of intention,…of all adequation between meaning and saying.

Iterability alters…leaves us no room but to mean (to say) something that is (already, always, also) other than what we mean (to say) … It is not necessary to imagine the death of the sender or of the receiver, to put the shopping list in one’s pocket, or even to raise the pen above the paper in order to interrupt oneself for a moment. The break intervenes from the moment that there is a mark, at once. It is iterability itself, ..passing between the re- of the repeated and the re- of the repeating, traversing and transforming repetition.

1 Like
15

Well said. Basically as soon as we put the sign in the world as an object of perception — and take the “signified” out of a special inner sanctum — we have the instability and perceiver-relativity of its significance.

My expressed affection for “phonocentrism” is a nod, however, to the face-to-face situation that gives far more context for interpretation. For Derrida, it was of course about the presumed proximity of the phoneme to the signified. He focused on a great target, but the proximity of the voice of the other is also the proximity of their face, and so on. It is also the historical proximity of those conversing.

Of course signs between us in the air, even as we talk face to face, signify differently for both of us. Through the call and response of signs ( Bakhtin’s dialogue ), we may come to feel that we understand one another, that we share the world with a new intensity.

16

I suggest that it’s the “ideality” of the sound-image, for instance, that likewise makes repetition possible.

There’s one strange concept here, and it goes back to Plato and Heraclitus and others. Derrida is giving us a good version of “forms.” People have tended to want to “freeze” this ideality, to “lose” it by making it an atemporal substance.

17

Thank you, this is a fairly well-known clarification. In the case of religions, I prefer to deal with what they became and how they influenced the world, rather than with what they could have been under a correct reading.

Of course, there are too many generalizations in my text. In general, the ancient Greeks, Judaism, and Christianity are too different to be treated as something common. They all understood what the Word is in different ways.

Perhaps, for the Greeks, the Word was closely connected with Meaning. In Judaism, it is more complicated: the connection is not so obvious, because there text and meaning already have a certain rupture. They show that meaning and sign can be torn apart. This, for example, is expressed in the Kabbalistic idea of the shattered vessels: the world is damaged because of the mismatch between sign and meaning.

Judaism prescribes the fulfillment of all commandments, emphasizing that this is important even when the meaning is not understood by the human being. For the Greeks, perhaps, such a concept was not used. Sign and meaning were one and the same.

Christianity, by the way, has a very interesting concept: it says that “the Word became flesh.” Perhaps part of this concept is that icons are permitted in Christianity: the icon is a partially bodily, embodied sign.

I am writing all this not for theological reasons, but in order to continue exploring the concept that sign and body have different temporalities, and how this works in different traditions.

18

Derrida, in my view, is one of the most important contemporary thinkers, one who set the scale for contemporary philosophy. Precisely for this reason, I am interested in moving in directions that put pressure on his position. I see it as promising to approach him from the side of anthropology, the archaic, myth, and a reactivation of the Heideggerian understanding of time.

One can point out that in archaic cultures thinking through myth, dance and the sign were, almost everywhere, nearly equal as ways of communicating with spirits. For most of human history, mythic thinking was the dominant form; modern Western civilization is rather an exception, almost a fluctuation. Thinking and communication with spirits were practically synonymous.

An image gives the spirit form, place, body, visibility. It says, as it were: “here he is.” A mammoth on the wall is not simply a drawing of a mammoth, but a trace, a double, a place of power, a point of contact.

Dance gives the spirit time, movement, rhythm, entry into the body. It says not “here he is,” but “he is happening now.” The dancer does not simply depict an animal or a spirit, but temporarily becomes a channel of its movement.

That is, one can say: the image fixes the spirit in space; dance calls the spirit forth in time.

But for me something else is more important: these are essentially two archetypal ways of thinking and understanding time. Time as something motionless — through the sign — and bodily time. The first is traditional Western metaphysics; the second is Heidegger’s ontology. Heidegger’s goal is to get out of thinking in signs. Derrida, in essence, tries to undermine Heidegger’s attempt to arrive at an embodied thinking of time. He says, as it were: no, your attempts are fruitless; all the same, everything remains a sign.

19

Yes, that’s my speculation too. Meaning can be seen as the nexus between (literal) word and (logical) word. And it remains a fair point: How deeply is language implicated in what is thinkable for us?

I thought about going into that, but didn’t want to try your patience. How does logos, understood as divine reason or rationality, become incarnated as Jesus? This is no easier an image to understand than picturing Jesus as a bit of text.

20

This is already too complex a topic, and too deeply bound up with religion. I am afraid I will not be able to go into it deeply here. Moreover, my reflections are not about religion, but about how time manifests itself in the sign, in dance, and in the body.

Phenomenology, as a philosophical movement, is often considered too anthropic and therefore suspicious. But the sign is no less anthropic, because obviously a sign also does not exist outside human beings. Clay tablets are just stones of a certain shape for the world; they become text only for us.

Derrida moves away from phenomenology and the body, whereas I still consider this a promising direction.

21

I see Heidegger-Derrida a bit differently. Many readers of Heidegger, especially those who follow Merleau-Ponty’s embodied approach to perception, are disappointed that he never wrote specifically about the body, but assume that his approach is embodied. I think he deliberately avoided talking about the body because his thinking is more de-bodied than embodied.

What I mean by that is he deconstructs the body that phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty pre-suppose, not that he believes Dasein is disembodied. In this he is closer to Husserl than to Merleau-Ponty. Husserl reduces the embodied ego to a pre-bodily dynamic of time consciousness.

As far as thinking of time in terms of rest or motion, each implies the other, and for Heidegger the problem with using the metaphor of motion to describe time is that a thing which moves must remain fixedly what it is throughout the iteration of its spatial displacement. If each quantitative change in position were accompanied by a qualitative difference in kind, it would make no sense to talk about ‘this same thing’ in motion. It would make no sense to talk about motion at all.

But time is not this ‘same thing’ which displaces itself from to moment. It changes in kind as it changes in degree, so it is never the same time which is ‘moving’. There no rest and no movement where there is no ‘same thing’.

Signs are assumed to signify something just as things are said to move. The thing is self-identical in its quality as it changes position, and the sign is assumed to be self-identical in the information it carries. Not rest in themselves as they convey change or reference. Isnt this what you mean by sign? I understand Derrida to be deconstructing this concept.

He doesn’t begin with either moving or motionless signs, he begins with altering repetition, which is not the movement of a sign. He begins with what prevents something present from being purely present to itself. This is not a sign, it is an articulation internal difference build into the structure of identity, the self, the ‘I’, the self-same.

What are we doing when we talk about that which exists outside the human being? Are these beings, materiality, objects? Do these exist in themselves? If not, so they only exist in relation to each other? And if so, how would you articulate the nature of this structural relationality of a world outside of the human being?

Would you say that this world consists in affecting itself? That it amounts to differences making a difference in other differences? How might one articulate such a system of differences? Furthermore, how might one draw a line separating what is human signifying from our inseparable co-existence with the rest of the world?

Does anthropocentism mean projecting human process of meaning onto the world outside us, or does it mean constructing the concept of anthropos which producws artificially boundaries and oppositions between something called ‘man’ , something called ‘animal’ and something called the ‘inanimate’?