Stamatia Portanova

This chapter offers a speculative reading of the concept of rhythm in relation to capital and in the context of financial technologies such as trading algorithms, bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies (the blockchain), which are treated through a reading of the posthumanist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Defined as the gait of difference escaping both chaos and order, rhythm is here defined as that which continuously changes direction along critical, although infinitesimal, differentiations. Departing from this definition, the chapter focuses on different financial milieus in an attempt to understand the way in which these milieus might said to be rhythmic, that is, more than mere metric repetition. Milieus are defined by Deleuze and Guattari as periodic repetitions of coded components. In this sense, they are not normally rhythmic, they are metric. However, milieus also pass into each other in the process of becoming, transcoding themselves and giving birth to a proc...

Drawing on a critical review of the relevant trans-disciplinary literature, and combining it with the method of auto-ethnography, this paper analyzes the sociocultural impact of distance learning. The aim is to highlight how, in the age of ‘post-education’ (Serpieri, 2020) and of ‘platformized’ educational institutions (van Dijck, Poell & de Waal, 2019), we are witnessing an intensification of screen-based discipline, but also a parallel explosion of creative potential, in pedagogical processes. This two-way transformation of educational systems will be here defined as the emergence of a new ‘edu-rhythm’, bearing in mind Alfred N. Whitehead’s philosophy of education (1947), and its focus (much before the advent of e-learning technologies and social media) on the organic rhythm of education as the gradual growth of a teaching/learning cell, a process characterized by different developmental phases and by an alternate need for disciplined attention and free distraction. Following this...

The movement of black bodies has often been captured by motion-tracking/sensing technologies in different contexts and situations, from animation cinema to facial recognition, from art to police preemptive profiling. As often argued by critical and media theorists, digital technologies of this kind operate an interesting ambiguous datafication of the black body, by filtering data along a subtle and shifting border between the invisibility of the captured body and the visibility of its movement. This article will discuss the motion capture of Savion Glover’s tap dance performance for the animation movie Happy Feet. Applying an interdisciplinary perspective given by the encounter between dance and movement studies, philosophy and cultural studies, the article tries to move the discussion beyond the simple critique of digital technologies as neutralizing forms of representation, and beyond the theoretical and practical attempts to preserve a ‘lived-in’ and ‘body-specific’ experience of...

This article is an introduction to and exploration of the concept of ‘soft thought’. What we want to propose through the definition of this concept is an aesthetic of digital code that does not necessarily presuppose a relation with the generative aspects of coding, nor with its sensorial perception and evaluation. Numbers do not have to produce something, and do not need to be transduced into colours and sounds, in order to be considered as aesthetic objects. Starting from this assumption, our main aim will be to reconnect the numerical aesthetic of code with a more ‘abstract’ kind of feeling, the feeling of numbers indirectly felt as conceptual contagions’, that are ‘conceptually felt but not directly sensed. The following pages will be dedicated to the explication and exemplification of this particular mode of feeling, and to its possible definition as ‘soft thought’.

By Stamatia Portanova MIT Press, 2013 179 pp./S30.00 (hb) Stamatia Porta nova has taken what would be a bare technical datum for many--the digitalization through various means of choreography and dance performance--and used it as a wide-ranging platform for a rethinking of nearly all the terms involved with any digital philosophy. What is at stake for Portanova is nothing less than a renewed philosophy of movement and overcoming of mind/ body dualism that continues to crop up in interpretations of dance and the digital. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Interrogating the early history of cinema with Loie Fuller and Dziga Vertov as well as iconic and digitally enabled dance breakthroughs by Merce Cunningham, Bill T. Jones, and William Forsythe, Portanova reveals how aesthetic and post-aesthetic practices, in conjunction with digital technologies, can help us reexamine and sometimes revise a long philosophical history of movement: from the swerving "clinamen" (the deviation of falling atoms) in Lucretius, to Benedict de Spinoza in the seventeenth century and Antonin Artaud in the twentieth, to how Alfred North Whitehead can aid us today in moving past formulations from Gilles Deleuze. In painstakingly examining what is involved in the desubjectifying and dehumanizing (or posthuman) abstracting operations of digital technology, exemplified in its choreographic uses, Portanova is anxious to restore a certain constructivism to the discussion: even the concept of infinity, or virtuality, a potent detonator since the days of the pre-Socratic clinamen, and especially since its systematization by Nietzsche and Deleuze, seems to have lost some of its urgency. One cannot simply continue detonating or hammering systems, if one does not want to end up with sheer chaos. (136) The key to Portanova's project is her particular use of "abstraction," which, here, is "everything that can be 'abstracted' from the palpable materiality of the real" (2). This carries an obvious relation to the numerical or computational operations of the digital, without being identical to it. Portanova is making a strenuous effort not to prioritize either "abstract" mental operations or embodied movement. These double senses of the digital, referring, on the one hand, to the technological property or machine or application and, on the other, to a kind or mode of thought that relies on code or digits, are put into play in increasingly rich and complex ways throughout the book. Movement without a Body strives to do nothing less than retrieve the power of thought--what, in Deleuze's judgment, could only be delivered via a shock from the "outside." This implies recourse to the "sensible," that which can only be sensed, yet results in a jumping across the sensory modalities in a "conflict of the faculties" where an idea is "something which is communicated from one faculty to another, but it is metamorphosed and does not form a common sense." This movement of Deleuze's "Idea" is at the heart of Portanova's attempted transformation, since she is adapting "choreographic thought" as the "common transcendental denominator of the faculties: that which makes perception become imagination, that which transforms imagination into memory, and that which makes of memory pure thought" (7). In Movement without a Body, dance becomes the object of these three "transcendental faculties," with what can be imagined, remembered, and thought corresponding to video, motion capture, and choreographic software as "the concrete technologies associated with these abstract faculties" (7). In elaborating this "abstract pragmatics of the choreography-technology relation" (8), Portanova attempts to provoke ways these relations can themselves "think." More than proposing a virtual body to replace subjective, phenomenologically oriented accounts, Portanova defines these virtual relations as an "incorporeal potential for variation" (9)--the unlimited potentiality of dance gestures to change and be other than what they are, or digital bits to continue or constitute new patterns. …

The origin of this article coincides with two different but parallel events. The first is my recent rereading of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s book Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia (2000), followed by my reflection on the possibility (or necessity) of adopting and adapting some of its key concepts into our time. In his Preface to the Anti-Oedipus, Michel Foucault explained how, in the particular climate of the 1970s, being anti-oedipal was a truly revolutionary lifestyle, a way of living and thinking in constant opposition to all hierarchies and fascisms (including, among the latter, the rigidity of the psychoanalytical and Marxist schools of thought, and all those petty micro-fascisms ‘that constitute the tyrannical bitterness’ of modern daily life) (Foucault in Deleuze and Guattari 2000, XIII). This lifestyle was described by Deleuze and Guattari themselves as ‘schizophrenia’, a horizontal relational attitude that induced one to be inspired by a multiplicity of things rather than guided by a unique dominating principle, to become multiplied into a crowd rather than remain the same individual; in other words, to produce a life in collaboration rather than obey the exclusive and solipsistic logic of a dominating ego.

This response experiments with the practice of the interval, in order to performatively write in the little perceptual and cognitive gaps opening between the act of reading Erin Manning’s article ‘Wondering the world directly’, and the gesture of looking at the sky. The idea of the interval is in fact taken directly from Manning’s piece, together with Whiteheadian concepts such as ‘prehension’, ‘superject’, ‘nexus’, ‘eternal object’ and ‘society’. The aim is to respond to the way Manning’s writing amplifies the experience of cloud watching by proposing an elision of consciousness from the experience itself, and by replacing subjectivity with the more-than-human magic of ‘wondering the world’. It is, therefore, thanks to the reading of Manning's article, that the experience of looking can reveal itself as a ‘becoming-cloud’. This response tries to also give something in conceptual exchange.

... revealing the unfolding of thought as a continuous becoming of the thinking body and the idea as unpredictable thought-event (Deleuze ... Beyond clear definitions and appro-priations, beyond precise times and spaces, beyond movement and stasis, thinking does not ...