We all know that manifestos traditionally and necessarily are light on practical details and heavy on rhetorical ambitions. Still, recent times have to an increasing extent demanded a mighty claim for dance and dancing. Why is it necessary to dance? In the first place, and
especially in periods when our world and the earth need our support, to still keep dancing. I don’t mean for social reasons or as some form of celebration, but dancing may be for oneself, at home, somewhere, maybe together in a studio or on stage, in a dance class, gathering or workshop. Dancing.
A detour became inevitable. It’s common to dismiss paintings of nudes, all kinds of nudes, with respect to power, the male gaze, scopophilia, abuse, exploitation and so on, and all those reasons are actual and true. Giorgio Agamben, the Italian thinker, however, wanted to know more and asked himself, but why? Is it really that obvious, and the answer was, yes, it is. Agamben, after all, calling himself a philosopher didn’t give up but insisted, arguing that even though all those paintings are questionable, to say the least, thinking through, not about, them is a slightly different story.
From the perspective of the painter, why bother to paint if it was all about having undressed people around? Might there in fact exist an underlying or in regard of painting, not the motif as such, urge? Not that painters necessarily were aware of it, but still some hidden motivation.
Agamben’s proposal is that if the monochrome, so to say, is the first painting, and a canvas divided by a horizon the second, the nude is the last painting, or perhaps better, painting at the last instance. The nude proposes Agamben, exclaims: Here it is, all of it, and behind this, there’s nothing more to it. The last painting, not in the sense of stopping to paint, but if the monochrome is one and the first, the nude is the last and also one, in the sense that the nude is without. The nude is painting in the last instance, exactly because there’s nothing more to reveal, or what is revealed bounces painting back into epistemology.
Agamben makes a difference between naked and nude, where naked is what we are in front of the law or when strip searched by the border police. Naked implies display and being exposed whereas, in regard to Agamben, nude has more to do with skinny dipping, family albums and even something natural. Nude is practised and not directly on display. Differently expressed there’s a difference in regard to agency, in the sense that naked is located and fixed and nude carries the agency of acting upon the world.
Agamben never makes the seemingly obvious connection between naked, nude and bare, which in his landscape in the form of bare life designates a state of being without criteria, conditions or qualities, and hence without responsibilities as well as rights. Although in the context of Agamben, political and social theory bare life is conventionally understood as unfavourable and rightly so, but from a philosophical perspective bare life is neither good nor bad, but as much as it’s without rights it’s simultaneously freed from obligations, or is, in fact, detached from the matrix that makes such a dialectic possible.
The nude in a painting, beyond social interpretations which cannot consider anything else than naked, is bare life. The nude isn’t signifying, embodying or representing bare life, because the inscription or integration into language is already and inevitably introducing criteria. The nude, any nude, in the painting, is bare life, and since bare life is without qualities there can be nothing more to it. It’s all there is. The nude is simultaneously whatever and no matter what, but nothing in between. At the end of the day, philosophically speaking, the nude falls through the matrix of value and becomes self-referential.
For the sake of clarity, a tiny disclaimer. Self-referential is not synonymous with or related to meta. Self-referential, in this context, is one step away from the thing in itself, whereas meta instead indicates an awareness of medium, illusion, not seldom neighbouring deconstruction. Quentin Tarantino’s films are at times called self-referential in the sense of quoting film history. The director is showing that he knows what he is doing, and, although not explicitly, is making films about film, in other words, meta. Self-referential and meta in this sense is clever, at times self-indulgent and not rarely vain. In regard to Agamben, this cannot be the case because bare life, the nude is exactly the opposite of awareness or smart. It is what it is, no more, no less, tout court.
The realm of the possible is the domain of probability. Possibly this or that, probably this or that, more or less likely, always within the already acknowledged or imaginable. Potentiality is something altogether different, the realm beyond the possible, impossible, recognition or knowledge. Potentiality is where probability disintegrates in favour of indetermination, something fully unforeseeable or contingency. The obsession in the painter is exactly that the nude is potentiality (not more or less, probably this or that, but plain and simply nude), or if not at least the promise of the possibility of potentiality.
Interestingly and consequently, this makes the encounter with the nude an experience without qualities or criteria. It’s a self-referential experience, in other words, the experience of experiencing, or the experience of oneself as potentiality.
Somewhere else, in a small text entitled “Notes on Gesture” Agamben contemplates dance, at least conceptually, however, thank God, not conceptual dance. A gesture proposes Agamben, doesn’t mean anything in itself. There’s nothing inherently good with thumbs up, or the middle finger has obviously nothing to with anything F word and so on. Meaning is assigned to a gesture and conventions take shape, and hence a gesture gains direction. Recalling Hellenistic philosophy Agamben make clear that humans cannot conduct anything without giving it direction, every activity and not activity is carried by meaning. Things, stuff, actions, thought have one thing in common, so called, teleology.
This is when Agamben brings out his magic wand: swing and flick. What about if dance is considered a series of gestures, but when danced their assigned meaning is crossed out? Dance from this perspective is an activity without direction, without teleology. In other words, dance means nothing else than dance, eureka dance is self-referential.
This might come across as easy, dancing around without meaning, piece of cake, but in fact, to just dance, not asking the dance for something, assigning it meaning or even giving it context, is an exceptionally difficult task both in regard to dancing and experiencing a dance. But even though just dancing is next to impossible, if not worse, any dance that denounces itself as gesture carries the promise of self-referentiality, of experiencing oneself experiencing, which is identical to the experience of oneself as potentiality, as something without qualities and criteria, as bare or nude. Any dance, that’s not a dance about this or that, that doesn’t try to convey a message, is nude, or dancing is a process of becoming nude to oneself and to the world. And that is why, even and especially in a world saturated by crises, catastrophe, corruption, war, suffering and general fuckery, it is necessary, and why we must never stop dancing.
