Feeling Feelings, the Work of Russell Dumas Through Whitehead’s Process and Reality
by Philipa Rothfield
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Stamatia Portanova and Erin Manning for their generous and incisive comments on an earlier draft of this paper. I would also like to dedicate this paper to Russell Dumas.
Weblink
The following weblink is included because it offers a sense of feelings feeling other feelings, virtually, across bodies, time and space, related through the editing process but also through something else, through a sense of feeling that extends beyond one movement activity and into the next:
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=3erazaZDvBM
Details and acknowledgements: Dance Path (2005) video: 7:28
Performed by Hellen Sky, Greg Dyson, Lou Duckett, Philipa Rothfield, Shaun McLeod, Kim Vincs, Yumi Umiumare, Sally Smith, Luke Hockley, Helen Herbertson, Ros Warby, David Corbet, Anne O'Keeffe, Elizabeth Keen, Tony Yap, Christos Linou, Viona Lowenthal, Rochelle Carmichael, Angie Potsch, Nicky Marr, Nick Papas, David Wells.
Camera & edit: Dianne Reid
Additional Camera: Peta O'Doherty & Rowena Di Stefano
Music: Rae Howell (Sunwrae)
Artistic Director: Dianne Reid
Assistant Director: Emma Porteus
Producer: Dancehouse
A video collage of the living history of Dancehouse, centre for independent contemporary arts in Melbourne, Australia. Twenty-two independent dance artists danced their recollections of working in the Dancehouse studios…reflecting on their performances, their practice, their collaborations.
Screenings: Channel 31, Melbourne, Australia (2007)
Notes
[1] Whitehead writes of the many coming together, conjoining in the production of newness, in the creation of the novel entity, and of the sense in which the novel entity then becomes one of the many, the new many, as it were — “The ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to conjunction, creating a novel entity other than the entities given in disjunction. The novel entity is at once the togetherness of the ‘many’ which it finds, and also it is one among the disjunctive ‘many’ which it leaves” (Whitehead, 1960: 32).
[2] “A simple physical feeling enjoys a characteristic which has been variously described as ‘re-enaction,’ ‘reproduction,’ and ‘conformation.’ This characteristic can be more accurately explained in terms of the eternal objects involved. There are eternal objects determinant of the objective datum which is the ‘cause,’ and eternal objects determinant of the definiteness of the subjective form belonging to the ‘effect.’ When there is re-enaction there is one eternal object with two-way functioning, namely, as partial determinant of the objective datum, and as partial determinant of the subjective form” (Whitehead,1960: 364). Conformal feelings more generally exhibit this character of re-enactment.
[3] “In the phraseology of mathematical physics a feeling has a vector character” (Whitehead, 1960: 353-354). “…remember that in physics ‘vector’ means definite transmission from elsewhere” (177). In physics, vectors allow quantity to be qualified through the notion of direction. For example, the motion of a car has a speed but it also travels in a direction. These combine to create velocity. Velocity is represented in physics via vector relations. Feelings are directional towards the new as they come from the old: “The feelings are inseparable from the end at which they aim; and this end is the feeler. The feelings aim at the feeler, as their final cause” (339). “Feelings are ‘vectors’; for they feel what is there and transform it into what is here” (133).
[4] Although ‘one’ sounds like me, for Whitehead, one could be a singular entity or a single fact of togetherness, a nexus.
[5] My lived sense of it was that something new was happening in my dancing and I could feel it. The feeling I felt seemed a secondary experience — consequent upon the corporeal activity. The distinction between the activity of the dancing as the source of the emergent feelings and my agency as the source moves this account out of the zone of embodied agency into one which attributes agency to the process itself, to the process of the dancing as the source and site of emergent feeling. It’s not that I cannot thereby access these feelings. It is rather that the process itself creates something which I am, as a consequence, able to feel. Similarly, the process of elimination is also a feature of the process itself (the dancing), rather than a subjective act carried out by me. It’s not that I don’t do it (produce the eliminations), it is rather that the eliminated feelings (negative prehensions) don’t do me. (Thanks to Erin Manning for this latter form of words).
[6] “A feeling can be genetically described in terms of its process of origination, with its negative prehensions whereby its many initial data become its complex objective datum” (Whitehead, 1960: 354).
[7] What lasts is the enduring pole of the subjective process, the superject. As far as emergent reality is concerned, it makes sense to speak of the subject-superject but a pure focus on emergence lends itself to talk of the subject as such.
[8] “It is better to say that the feelings aim at their subject, than to say that they are aimed at their subject. For the latter mode of expression removes the subject from the scope of the feeling and assigns it to an external agency” (Whitehead, 1960: 339).
[9] This is expressed in “The Category of Objective Identity - There can be no duplication of any element in the objective datum of the ‘satisfaction’ of an actual entity, so far as concerns the function of that element in the ‘satisfaction’ ” (Whitehead, 1960: 39).
[10] Gilles Deleuze writes: “According to Nietzsche the eternal return is in no sense a thought of the identical but rather a thought of synthesis, a thought of the absolutely different which calls for a new principle outside science. The principle is that of the reproduction of diversity as such, of the repetition of difference…” (Deleuze, 1983: 46).
[11] These include notions such as relevance, decision, proximity, givenness-potential, God’s experience/prehensions, propositions, concrescence-transmutation, rhythm.
[12] David Hume writes: “That all our simple ideas in their first appearance, are derived from simple impressions, which are correspondent to them, and which they exactly represent… An impression first strikes upon the senses, and makes us perceive heat or cold, thirst or hunger, pleasure or pain, of some kind or other. Of this impression there is a copy taken by the mind, which remains after the impression ceases; and this we call an idea” (Hume, 1974: 13-17). See also Whitehead (1960: 379).
[13]Chatterjea “On the Value of Mistranslations, Contaminations and Veerings Away, The Category of Contemporary Choreography in Asian Dance”, p.1.
[14] Whitehead illustrates the three categories in terms of a concrescence of feeling which is jointly mediated by several actual entities which are the source of feelings in the one actual entity (Whitehead, 1960: 345). See also Elizabeth Kraus (1979: 106).
[15] This is the subject of both Alexander and Feldenkrais techniques.
[16] Unrealized in the sense of incomplete: “An actual entity is a process in the course of which many operations with incomplete subjective unity terminate in a completed unity of operation, termed the ‘satisfaction’” (Whitehead, 1960: 335). Also, “The satisfaction is merely the culmination marking the evaporation of all indetermination…” (1960: 323).
[17] This isn’t simply because of the preparations linked to pirouettes, tours à la seconde, tours en attitude, tours en l’air, pas ballonné and the like (see Lincoln Kirstein, Muriel Stuart and Carlus Dyer, 1977). It also follows the fact of ballet’s fixed lexicon. Of course, timing can be and is attenuated, and all dancers deal with the vicissitudes of the moment, but the codification of ballet has been finessed over centuries. It is assisted by visual forms of representation that govern the look of movement, as well as a series of fixed directions which undergird the dancer’s sense of orientation. See Gabrielle Brandstetter (2005: 67-79). The fact that the legibility of ballet came to be oriented to the front (according to the proscenium arch of the Paris Opera house and its subsequent avatars) cuts back on Dumas’ notion of the circularity of movement. See Marvin Carlson (1989). Theatres ‘in the round’, such as the Balinese ceremonial courtyard or family compound, cannot avail themselves of the unilateral location of the observer-artist implied by perspectival forms of drawing.
[18] Dancing the Virtual (dir. Erin Manning and Brian Massumi), Sense Lab, Concordia University, La Société des Arts Technologiques, Montreal, May 2006.
[19] “In the organic philosophy an actual entity has ‘perished’ when it is complete. The pragmatic use of the actual entity, constituting its static life, lies in the future. The creature perishes and is immortal… This conception of an actual entity in the fluent world is little more than an expansion of a sentence in the Timaeus: ‘But that which is conceived by opinion with the help of sensation and without reason, is always in the process of becoming and perishing and never really is’ ” (Whitehead, 1960: 126).
[20] “This divine ordering is itself matter of fact, thereby conditioning creativity” (Whitehead, 1960: 46).
[21] Gardner danced with Douglas Dunn in New York, and later joined Danceworks (dir. Nanette Hassall). She has also worked with Dumas and has performed with Dance Exchange. She is also co-editor (with Elizabeth Dempster) of the journal Writings on Dance.
[22] Perhaps it’s an intensification of the disjunction of potential, the adversions and aversions facilitated by the concrescent process, what might be called “dancing the virtual”, cf Dancing the Virtual.
Bibliography
Brandstetter, Gabrielle. “The Code of Terpiscore, The Dance Theory of Carlo Blasis, Mechanics as the Matrix of Grace”, Topoi, Vol.24, no.1 (2005).
Carlson, Marvin. Places of Performance, The Semiotics of Theatre Architecture (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989).
Chatterjea, Ananya. “On the Value of Mistranslations, Contaminations and Veerings Away, The Category of Contemporary Choreography in Asian Dance”, paper presented to Choreography and Corporeality Working Group, Reconstructing Asian-ness(es) in the Global Age. International Federation of Theatre Research, Seoul, Korea, July 14th - 19th (2008).
Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature, vol.1 (London: Dent, Everyman’s Library, 1974),
Kirstein, Lincoln, Stuart, Muriel and Dyer, Carlus. The Classic Ballet, Basic Technique and Terminology (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1977).
Kraus, Elizabeth. The Metaphysics of Experience (New York: Fordham University Press, 1979).
Sherburne, Donald W. (ed). A Key to Whitehead’s Process and Reality (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1966).
Whitehead, Alfred N. Process and Reality, An Essay in Cosmology (New York and Evanston: Harper and Row, 1960).
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