Playing Out:
Practices and Views of Contemplative PerformanceJeffrey Grygny, Doctoral Dissertation, 1996
INTRODUCTION:
FROM PRIVATE BODIES TO ECOLOGICAL BODIES:
PERFORMANCE TRAINING AS SOMATIC RE-EDUCATION
Jeffrey Grygny, 1996
And although perhaps (or rather as I shall shortly say, certainly ). . .
Descartes, MeditationsOne of the philosophical projects of the twentieth century has been the reconciliation of the Cartesian dualism of mind and body; subject and object. As multicultural understanding acknowledges differing cultural realities; as deconstruction shows the ideal of the knowing subject, separate from the object of knowledge, to have been "white mythology;" as feminism exposes the bases of Western thought in patriarchal power plays; as ecological concerns heighten our sense of urgency towards the project of reconstructing our collective relations with our planetary home; and as pragmatic concerns shift the focus from theories to practices, such attempts have transgressed their former marginal status to become part of "legitimate" knowledge, introducing new criteria for legitimacy; new knowledges. New practices are needed to embody these new knowledges-- to "play them out." My contribution to this movement is to point out that visionary artist-philosophers have developed performance training practices that are designed to cultivate a shift in the performer's ways of perceiving and being. Such practices, I say, are specifically designed to allow the body-mind-- culturally constructed as a disembodied subject-- to enter consciously into a lived experience of process and relation. Performance training, together with alternative theoretical views, constitutes a workable next step in thought and education-- the re-education of the body mind.
I shall now close my eyes, stop up my ears, turn away all my senses . . .
1.
In The Tremulous Private Body, Francis Barker's foucauldian reading of seventeenth century discourses, he treats our everyday experiences of interiority and exteriority, public and private, as discursive social constructs inextricably related to the shifts in power/knowledge that took place in European culture at that time; Barker reads Restoration tragedy, the diary of Samuel Pepys, Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson, and Descartes' Meditations to trace "the moment when the very division between the public and private is constructed in its modern form" (14). In contrast with the full-bodied "carnivalesque" medieval world characterized by Bakhtin, the new sense of "public" is the narrowly delimited realm of the specular, of surfaces and appearances. It is Descartes' separation of mind and body transposed into lived experience; the "real world" becomes what is clear, distinct, visible and measurable. The mind, one's private self, recedes into a darkened interior chamber, a living room, a framed canvas, a theatrical box set opening via the fourth wall of the senses onto an "external" reality. The boundaries of this internal/external division, underwritten in discourse and practice and to most purposes invisible because all-pervasive, are marked by fear of transgression, a fear that keeps "mind" bracketed between a hostile outer world and the proscribed, illicit world of bodily functions. According to Barker, an historical movement produced (erasing its traces in the process) our experience as modern men and women of the institutional, specular culture of the late twentieth century. This has profoundly conditioned the nature of performance (which is always embodied) in modern times.. . . I have a body, to which I am very closely united . . .
2.
In The Absent Body, phenomenologist and physician Drew Leder describes how "the body," the fact of embodiment, has been erased from Western knowledge and experience. Emphasizing abstract knowledge and linear discourse, making what is measurable and controllable tacitly "good" and what is ambiguous and mutable explicitly "bad," Western thought has tended to create a vast lacuna, a gap in legitimate knowledge where somatic experience ought to have had its place. Leder observes that the lived body tends to disappear from our experience when it is healthy, but "it often seizes our attention most strongly at times of dysfunction; we then experience the body. . . as a force that stands opposed to the self" (4). This phenomenon, he argues, contributes to the various dualisms of intellectual traditions. I believe that taking the body into account allows us (those of us who are interested, that is) to reconstruct our picture of reality and to revision the cultural history of the West, from the Romantic rebellion against the image of the cosmos as a vast machine, through the modernist cult of authenticity, up to and including Postmodern trends in thought and performance. It does not indeed seem to be a very controversial point any longer that somatic, lived experience ought to be included in our accounts of knowledge. But how to perform that inclusion, when the discursive apparatus of our traditions privilege many kinds of dualisms? Leder rightly points out that although Derrida's critique of self-presence is a critique of the Cartesian disembodied subject, embodiment still remains a marginal issue in deconstruction. Morris Berman observes that even studies of mentalité such as Foucault's are highly disembodied, charged with the intellectual distance that Berman calls characteristic of Western knowledge.
. . . nevertheless, because, on the one hand, I have a clear and distinct idea of myself in so far as I am only a thinking and unextended thing . . .3.
Linda Holler's feminist epistemological essay "Thinking with the Weight of the Earth" proposes a philosophy rooted in our experience of embodiment. Such a philosophy rejects claims to objectivity on the grounds that so-called "objectivity" is itself an embodied experience, though a paradoxical one of absence. The careful screening-out of the ambiguity of the flesh is, according to Holler, the epistemological consequence of the Western tradition of transcendence. Scientists, she says, have un-self-reflectively appropriated the notions of omniscience attributed to God in former times, and constructed their own rationality in its place-- an enterprise underwritten by anxiety and the will to power. Claiming a place radically "outside" the world for the rational mind, the knowing subject is both safe from the world's vagaries and in position to assume command. Holler (along with other feminist philosophers such as Catherine Keller and Susan Bordo) characterizes the naivet‚ of the classical scientific posture that it is possible to observe reality from an objective location outside of reality: "Epistemological distance," she writes, "parallels an already alienated self, an "I" that equates connectedness with death, objectivity with autonomy, and abstraction with freedom" (8).
. . . and because, on the other hand I have a clear and distinct idea of the body in so far as it is only an extended thing but which does not think . . .
4.
Process theologian David Ray Griffin has been gathering the writings of a host of thinkers under the heading "postmodern thought," which he defines as dissatisfied with deconstructive efforts to show the inherent inconsistencies of the modern episteme, and beginning to reconstruct philosophies and practices based on the principles of process and interrelatedness set forth in Alfred North Whitehead's "Philosophy of Organism." I want to make a connection between Whitehead's metaphysics and the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the premiere European philosopher of the body. If a philosophy of process and interrelatedness is to "make sense" (I claim), it must also be a philosophy of the body.-- if it is to be helpful and applicable to our enterprises as thinkers, artists, teachers and human beings faced with numerous and interlocking social, political, and personal challenges.
In Griffin's approach to "the philosophy of organism," it is crucial to expand the notion of "experience" past its conventional meaning of human subjectivity, developing an alternative to mind-body dualism. Since Whitehead's universe is radically constituted by experience, "mind" is not a "ghost in a machine," but an extension and amplification of the basic character of the world. As Linda Holler noted, Cartesian dualism comes from fear, the denial of relatedness: it makes human beings eternal outsiders, both ontologically and in feeling. The subtle sense is that the universe is a hostile place and needs to be subjugated (I'll examine these themes in much greater detail in chapters two and four). From the process perspective, our conscious experience emerges from a background from which it is not fundamentally different. Whitehead calls the principle of perception "presentational immediacy," referring to the clear and distinct, bounded outlines of objects, separated by empty space, seemingly non-interactive.
Whitehead's metaphysics foregrounds relations rather than things; "things" are seen as processes in time, produced by the constant mutual interaction of other processes. The body, therefore, is connected to its temporal-spatial environment in so many ways that its independent existence is more a convenient designation than an objective fact. Perception is an interaction of perceptive structures and perceivable phenomena. Presentational immediacy, in Whitehead's account, emerges from the evolutionary development of refined sense organs. Griffin restates this important principle of process philosophy:.........Consciousness, which arises only late in each momentary experience, if at all, tends to illuminate .........only the more self-created, seemingly independent products arising at the tailend of each .........moment of experience, leaving the relational origins of each experience largely in the dark (5).
Whitehead calls the background of relations upon which objects appear as clear and distinct perceptions "perception in the mode of causal efficacy." This term signifies the relational origins of appearances; the matrix of interrelated processes that supports cause and effect.
Whitehead's universe is a universe of feeling, of individualities forming out of their mutual interactions, manifesting their fullness of experience, and re-forming into new events. A clear understanding of this view can support practices that cultivate non-dualistic experience-- but Whitehead's terminology is rather dauntingly abstract.5.
Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology describes a world of process in the more poetic language of embodiment, painting a picture of the body extending itself into its surroundings via the senses; of the world enveloping a body from which it is not separate; of world and body mutually influencing each other both cognitively and sensuously. Merleau-Ponty's terminology borders on the erotic in his descriptions of the intimacy of experience. He uses the term "flesh" to speak of the "substance" of the world, both subject and object, mind and body; at the same time flesh is not inert, but an active creating that occurs before any thought can form of it, but is nevertheless affected by thought and can be recast by thought in innumerable ways. In chapter three, I make extensive comparisons between Merleau-Ponty's :flesh" and Whitehead's theory of perception; both point to the malleable quality of lived experience-- the interaction between thought and experience, registered by Foucault's "epistemes" and amenable to be shaped by means of skillful practice.
. . . it is certain that I, that is to say my mind, by which I am what I am is entirely and truly distinct from my body, and may exist without it.6.
We simultaneously think and feel the world, and though there may be few card-carrying Cartesians left these days, the world we feel is often that of the disembodied subject, as if "who I am" were independent of the flesh rather than constituted by and constituting it. You may test this proposition out in your own experience, of course, apart from archeological attempts to trace its ancestry. Sometimes, though, it takes exceptional circumstances to highlight a condition that we generally accept as "normal:" even while we are in the midst of speculation on these matters, our fleshy experience may be disengaged and unexamined. Are you thinking with the weight of the earth? Is your breath and heartbeat part of your thought process? Would you think differently if it were? At some point in the endeavor to rethink Western metaphysics, it seems necessary to make the ineffable leap into practice.An important (if neglected) figure in the movement of what author/choreographer Louise Steinman calls "philosophy of the body" is Viola Spolin, whose improvisation games, developed from the nineteen-forties to the sixties, are standards for teachers and performers to this day. Spolin's exercises, practical to the bone, embody some of the most recondite points of process philosophy and phenomenology. In Spolin's view, improvisation is a fully embodied activity that simply arises from one's connection to experience: it is a playful process that occurs when the player drops his or her sense of self-conscious separateness and becomes absorbed in the flow of a game. "It is necessary," she wrote, "to become part of the world around us and make it real by touching it, seeing it, feeling it, tasting it, and smelling it-- direct contact with the environment is what we seek" (6).Compare this with Holler's feminist epistemology: "As the thickness of space rushes in to fill the emptiness of abstract and extended space, the relational presence that turns notes into melodies, words into phrases with meaning, and space into vital forms with color and content, also holds the knower in the world" (3).
As I will develop in detail in chapters two and three, Spolin's exercises gradually train the performer to relax into his or her bodily experience, to witness the background of interconnections as "space," and to engage space, objects, and other players to generate a performative world of free play. This world contrasts sharply with the lived world of institutional culture; the inhibited experience, self-consciousness, self-censorship and fear of judgement that the modern Western episteme induces in its subjects. Spontaneity, the holy grail of the (neo) modernist aesthetic, happens in the present moment, like a Whiteheadian concrescence or a Jamesian "drop of experience." Spolin speaks the language of process (and the rhetoric of epistemological reform) when she writes:
..........Through spontaneity we are re-formed into ourselves. It creates an explosion that for the ..........moment frees us from handed-down frames of reference. . . Spontaneity is the moment of ..........personal freedom when we are faced with a reality and see it, explore it and act accordingly. In ..........this reality the bits and pieces of ourselves act as an organic whole (4).
Spolin's exercises were designed for the actors of her time, which largely meant the realistic Stanislavskian performance style. As realism in the theater began to melt into less representational modes, theater games also became more open-ended, less directed towards "acting scenes."
Joseph Chaikin's "Open Theater" developed the vocabulary of performance training further; in keeping with the group's investigations of social norms and group collaboration, many of their exercises deconstructed culturally-conditioned performance modes. The Open Theater's work played on the boundaries of personal and public, external appearance and felt experience. They also developed Spolin's work towards cultivating the performer's ability to recognize and empathize with the experience of others. In Spolin's famous mirror exercise, two players gradually blend their individual activities into one mutual activity. In the Open Theater's sound-and-movement transformation exercise, performers attune themselves to the play of individual expressions, generating a series of calls and responses that is literally ineffable, laden with communications that spring from body to body.As discussed in detail in chapter one, the Postmodern dance movement made rich contributions to the philosophy of the body: artists of the Judson Church, The Grand Union, Anna Halprin ("my own training was. . . part of a Dewey-Whitehead philosophy."), Simone Forti and Deborah Hay used their bodies to make investigations into the interrelations between the human and natural worlds. Using John Cage's Zen-inspired chance operations techniques, they created a playful world of bodies interconnected within a framework or score of rules, in a somatic space of mutual here-and-nowness. Steve Paxton's "Contact Improvisation," which I discuss in chapter five,
precisely investigates the body's capacity to extend its boundaries, to surrender the exclusive reference point of visuality into the experiences of weight and spontaneous interchange. Paxton said "I stress that the dancers. . . should just be there as animals, as bundles of nerves, as masses and bones . . . touching that other bundle and letting that be the work" (6). In the practice of Contact Improvisation, bodies join together into a motile mass at the point of contact; the performer's sense of self literally extending beyond the skin into the body of another. Such techniques embody the metaphysics of Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty: they open up alternatives to the experience of the Cartesian transcendent mind and discrete body.7.
Such philosophical practice is hardly a new idea. In The Body: Towards an Eastern Mind-Body Theory, comparative philosopher Yasuo Yuasa points out that in Japanese thought mind and body are not viewed as entirely distinct, but that mind-body unity is regarded as an achievement, the product of shugyo, "cultivation." In chapter three I discuss this useful notion of cultivation, which spans the gap between theory and practice, intellect and experience. Performance training, inspired in part by contact with Eastern performance traditions, is a modern Western mode of mind-body cultivation. Yuasa describes the mind-body connection in terms of Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitaro's notion of the "bright consciousness," which is like Western conscious subjectivity, informed by clear and distinct sense perceptions; and the "dark consciousness," which represents the body-like strata of mind: inarticulate, unconscious, and ultimately, as in Whitehead's notion of causal perception and the Zen notion of "big mind," connects human awareness through the body to the rest of the phenomenal world. From this point of view, cultivation practices further our sense of connectedness. Rational thought is exclusive to the "bright" consciousness; to investigate the dark intelligence of the body, different methodologies, more aesthetic than scientific, are needed.
8.
In chapters four and five I discuss performance training in terms of the transformation of the closed, narcissistic body-mind into an open, connective experience of self and world. Louise Steinman and somatic teacher Andrea Olsen discuss the work of such philosophers of the body as Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, Janet Adler, and Mary Starks Whitehouse to articulate the processes of body mind cultivation. Bainbridge Cohen's discipline of "Body Mind Centering" uses both anatomical knowledge and finely-cultivated proprioceptive attention to investigate the lived interior of the body with a precision that far exceeds traditional Western body practices (which are based on examining the dead flesh of corpses, or at best on a kind of mechanistic gymnastic paradigm). Bainbridge Cohen's students learn to make discriminations between the feelings of different anatomical structures, "knowing" the skeleton, nervous system, organs, and even the different fluid systems of the body by their specific feelings, providing a model of experience that can be extended into the interconnections between self and world. Apparently, the body is capable of far greater self-sensitivity than traditional Western disciplines, based on ignoring feeling, had conceived possible. The questions merely needed to be asked. Artists such as Deborah Hay have taken such knowledge to heart, teaching performance based on "cellular awareness," an activation of the whole body that generates a radically engaged performance mode. The practice of "Authentic Movement" created by Whitehouse and Adler cultivates the practitioner's ability to let the "dark consciousness" of the body express it's movements, generating a powerful resource for performance and for working with the habitual patterns that arise in improvisation.
What kind of experiences are available to the body-mind practitioner? At least, a manyfold increase in appreciation for the voices and modes of the Stanislavskian "instrument." Moving in a Body Mind Centering class, my sense of self was permanently changed by having my attention directed towards the somatic connections between the two ends of my spine: the richly sensitive nerve endings arranged around the openings of the digestive tract; the face and mouth and their corresponding nerve endings at the pelvic floor-- I felt like a mobile, tube-shaped being!
Performing "Authentic Movement," I found ancient wounds carried in my intestines; the tension of anger in my shoulders; I discovered that I could connect the feelings of the belly with the heart, beginning an interior healing process. Entire new languages of the body are being formed to articulate these kinds of experience, the thinking of the body.Cultivation reveals the price we pay for living in a soma-neglecting culture. Access to the dark consciousness puts us in touch with the unexamined injuries carried in our body's memory: fears, angers, wants, and long-forgotten pains emerge from the organs like grotesque creatures rising out of dark waters. These, like the horse-god in the play Equus, are forces to be reckoned with; likewise the feelings of breath and blood, the ebb and flow of cerebrospinal fluid, the constant activity of muscle tone, and the musical rhythms of glandular secretions play like spirits across the body's mythic landscape. Somatic investigations are not necessarily for the faint of heart, or for those who don't want to be scrupulously honest with themselves, or for those who have little tolerance for ambiguity and undecidability. As it used to say at the borders of maps, "There be dragons here." But the rewards may be worth the risks: the richness of body intelligence lies around the hidden pitfalls-- archetypes, cultural images, personal experiences, perceptions both ancient and fresh, sources of healing and wellsprings of creativity. Past the barriers of fear-- the fear of vulnerability that is this side of a greater sense of connection-- is an open and gentle heart. Past the diffuse and incohate confusion of unconsciousness there is a precise articulation of structures in which both self and other are perceived in a new way. The dragons can be befriended.
9.
Drew Leder cites the ninth-century Neo-Confucian philosopher Wang Yang Ming as an example of traditional somatic philosophy. In the Neo-Confucian syncretism of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism, to be a sage (or one can say, to be fully human) is to "form one body" with all things. The traditional Chinese term chi, signifying the psycho-somatic energy that moves through living things, expresses both process and embodiment: "Wind, rain, thunder, sun and moon, stars, animals and plants are essentially of one body with man . . . Since they share the same material force (chi), they enter into one another" (Wang Yang Ming, quoted in Leder 157). The organ for perceiving this mutuality is the "heart-mind," intellect and feeling together, the greater intelligence of the whole body, located in the heart.
Somatic cultivation leads to a lived sense of the flesh of the world, of the aliveness of all things, of one's heart for otherness. Buddhist ecological activist and systems philosopher Joanna Macy advocates expanding our sense of self from the self-possessed monad of Western thought to an identification with all beings. Indeed, from the systems point of view, from the point of view of embodiment, and in the perspective of Buddhist non theistic spirituality, the difference between self and other is conventional, a convenient designation not to be mistaken for the way things really are. From the Whiteheadian perspective of feminist process philosopher Catherine Keller, our collective survival may depend on our ability to stop feeling separate from the world, as if we had been sent to this hostile place from somewhere else. Keller promotes a "soft-core" self, capable of integrity but open to the malleability of experience of intimacy with the world. For Keller, the soft core self is "less like an apricot pit than the molten lava at the center of the earth, or the rising sap in the tree. . .
..........Getting centered, we feel the sudden warmth of the deeper desire. . . A desire that leads us ..........beyond ourselves-- to selves both new and other" (From a Broken Web 213).
The outlines of the problems of creating a truly ecological way of life begin to appear. In chapter four I discuss these problems in terms of Foucault's history of institutional culture and object relations psychology: problems of power and gender created by separativeness; the institutionalized anxiety of alienation, which relates to the family structure of modern Western culture, leading to various impairments of our collective soma. The Western project of erasing the body was neither motiveless nor unintelligent, and the task of its undoing is ringed with defenses of denial of its real difficulties-- at the very least, acknowledging embodiment means acknowledging our limitations and forming a relationship with mortality-- a prospect that our cultural norms often seem rallied to avoid. But as massive a shift in thought and practice as our circumstances require, it seems equally important to do something decisive. As a worker in the arts whose outlook has been changed by the perceptions made available by performance training and body mind cultivation, it seems best to promote these ideas and practices beyond the narrow (but ever-widening) circle in which they are presently available. The theoretical and practical resources for beginning a somatic re-education of our culture are fully developed. Art and performance have been expressing the different values of an enchanted world, a feeling for the sacredness of life and matter that arises from a sense of fundamental connectedness. I believe it is the responsibility of artists and teachers to cultivate this sense further, not for performers alone, but for educators, scientists, engineers, business people. Such people could benefit enormously from body education-- if they are ready for it-- both in terms of their physical and emotional health, and in terms of the decisions they make about child-rearing, choice of careers, and ways of life-- decisions that have immeasurable impact upon future life on earth. Adopting somatic re-education practices might bring about the realization of that old dream of the avant-garde, the inseparability of art and everyday life.
Somatic re-education presents a workable approach towards changing the conventions of our culture, so thoroughly permeated by the mechanical world-view (as Morris Berman calls it), the metaphysics of presence (Derrida), Cartesian dualism, or "discrete entity ontology" (Warwick Fox), towards a culture whose conventions we can only dimly imagine, but which would be conditioned by the principles of interconnectedness and embodiment. To sit down and devise a set of cultural norms based on the philosophy of organism would be to simply reproduce the totalitarianism of theory by which the present institutional culture came into being. A wiser approach is needed, one that works with things as they are without provoking revolution or enforced change. Cultural conventions, language, and perception are bound together in what Ludwig Wittgenstein called "forms of life." Any theory that is widely held, either explicitly as articles of faith and ideologies, or implicitly, such as conventional practices and institutions, is difficult to dislodge just because it functions in a context of social and cognitive interconnections. "What stands fast," Wittgenstein wrote, "does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it" (On Certainty 21e). By the same token, there is no overwhelming consensus that our culture needs such a radical overhaul-- for many people it works just fine, or if there are problems, they can be solved within existing foundational norms. From the point of view of would-be reformers, there are also questions of getting from here to there-- do we want to institutionalize body mind cultivation? If so, can it be done within present institutional structures, or do we need new ones? How do we find these new institutional structures? Is this another modernist utopian project, doomed to failure by its own unacknowledged internal contradictions? How do we speak in ways that do not reproduce the metaphysics we are seeking to replace? And I can hear the question: If we are opposing the organic, interconnected world-view to the mechanical, dualistic world-view, isn't that another dualism?
To deal with such questions, both conceptually and practically, I turn to the complementary philosophies of Wittgenstein (ordinary language) and Buddhism. What I get from ordinary language philosophy is that our culture works (to the extent that it does work, which is considerable-- we conduct relationships, raise children, feed, clothe and house ourselves and even have time for leisure and cultural activities) it works not because of our dominant paradigm, but because the paradigm is not monolithic. In the practice of everyday life it is contradicted, transgressed and slid around in every direction, just as life within every institution is more than the rules of the institution. Life happens in the interstices-- workers bring flowers into their cubicles, bodies tacitly interact in corridors and elevators, and feelings are expressed in the tones of people's voices, in the music they listen to. As Wittgenstein said, "rules come to an end;" and cultural conventions, like the organization of the body itself, are assemblages of disparate functions-- collages, chance compositions that came together and worked out ways of interacting based on their interactive capacities. This interconnecting fabric is the texture of ordinary life; always lubricated, slippery, beyond classification. This is how I read Stanley Cavell's "The Uncanniness of the Ordinary"-- treating the untreatable ground of experience that is already there, like Merleau-Ponty's "pre-cognitive consciousness," before we can arrive at any concepts about it. It would seem, utopian expectations to the contrary, that the experience of forming one body with all things feels just like ordinary life! We are always already in relation-- cultivation is not a matter of blowing all structures away into blissful unity, but of acknowledging the relatedness, interplay and openness that functions as the performance space of our life, the background of all our perceptions and cognitions. In the words of the famous Zen aphorism" "Before enlightenment I chopped wood and carried water. Now I chop wood and carry water." This view, as I discuss in chapter three, is a non-dualistic way to work with social conventions; not to destroy them, but to change their tone, recognizing that the solution to a problem may be discovered through a sympathetic investigation of the problem itself, whereupon, as Wittgenstein said, it simply ceases to have power as a problem.
Studying with the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa, I learned to recognize a sense of ordinariness that I didn't get from reading books on metaphysics, mythology, psychology or philosophy. Perhaps because Buddhism is a non theistic religion, it places emphasis on ordinariness, both in its doctrines and its ethos. Trungpa particularly discouraged his students from romanticizing spirituality. It is important to remember the ordinary when talking about revising the underlying codes of our culture and our mind-body relation. The project is like rebuilding a home while still living in it; there is no other place to go. Wittgenstein's philosophy worked discontinuously, by fits and gaps; Buddhist practice involves remembering ordinariness again and again, until it becomes ordinariness of a different character. As culturally-coded boundaries begin to shift, and the dragons that had been illegalized begin to return, chaos and confusion inevitably arise. In performance training it is important to be sensitive to the process and the anxieties provoked by transgressing "normal" experience. Some people may be terrified; others may become addicted, still others may accept it and take nourishment from it, incorporating it into their lives. The cultural fabric is in constant adaptation anyway-- in place of the (neo) modernist ideal of "breaking through" the barriers, contemplative practice suggests a more postmodern gentleness and humor as the fabric "gives."
Contemplative performance, whether as a work of art, as cultivation, or as ordinary life, is like the practice of ordinary language philosophy. Wittgenstein's investigations take place (as Cavell noticed) at the meetings of different voices; some still "held captive" by a picture of language ruled by disembodied ideal rules, others exhorting to "look, not think" and find out what language actually does in specific instances. The weaving of philosophy takes place in the interstices: rather than defining rules and criteria, contemplative performance plays around instances, gradually creating a context in which certain ideas "make sense" as others gradually dissolve. The fabric is gradually healed, made whole, not in one heroic act, like the patriarchal god's violent tearing of the cosmic mother's body, or the revolutionary's patricidal establishment of the "new order," but by innumerable interventions at the level of the cells and organs of everyday life.
