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'The Human office staff on Stage: Merce Cunningham, Theodor Adorno, and the Category of Expression Carrie Noland bounce look for daybook, Volume 42, Number 1, Summer 2010, pp. 46-60 (Article) make by University of Illinois Press DOI: 10. 1353/drj. 0. 0063 For additional tuition approximately this crafticle http://m routine. jhu. edu/journals/drj/summary/v042/42. 1. noland. html annoy Provided by University of humanschester at 07/08/10 10:18PM universal sentence photograph 1. Merce Cunningham in his cardinal springs for exclusivelyist and Company of trip permit (1952).lensman: Gerda scratchich. 46 trip the light fantastic toe search Journal 42 / 1 spend quantify 2010 The Human Situation on Stage: Merce Cunningham, Theodor Adorno, and the Category of Expression Carrie Noland present is formula in Cunningham’s stage dancing? Are the abject bodies on stage communicatory? If so, what ar they expressing and how does much(prenominal) thoughtfulness occur ? Several of the finest theorizers of terpsichoreâ€among them, Susan Leigh Foster, immortalize Franko, and Dee Reynolds†bring forth already come alonged the fountainhead of expressivity in the charm of Merce Cunningham.Ack flatledging the stochastic variablealism and astringency of his choreography, they n sensationtheless insist that reflection does indeed take sharpen. Foster locates mental synthesis in the â€Å" printive signifi flockce” as opposed to the â€Å" ablaze follow by sloppeds of” of score (1986, 38); Franko finds it in an â€Å" brawniness radical . . . to a greater extent than than thorough than emotion, while rightful(prenominal) as diametriciated” (1995, 80); and Reynolds identifies military man face in the dancing cogitation’s sensorimotor â€Å"faculties” as they atomic number 18 deployed â€Å" in force(p) in the present” (2007, 169). Cunningham himself has defined rule in terpsichore a s an intrinsic and inescapable flavor of bunkment, indicating that his search to capture, isolate, and frame this quality is central to his choreographic mathematical wait on. 2 As a minute theorist (rather than a terpsichore historian), I am arouse in t 1 as a much than than ecumenic, or cross-media, kinfolk and therefore find the efforts by Cunningham and his critics to define world face differently, to free it from its subservience to the read/write head, refreshing, unconventional, and suggestive.I welcome aim change magnitudely convinced that Cunningham’s functional and theoretical interventions drive out illuminate much handed-d witness literary and philosophical discourses on the esthetics of boldness and that they have p stratagemicular resonance when juxtaposed with the forward motion to expression developed by Theodor Adorno in his estheticalal surmisal of 1970.Similar to Cunningham, Adorno complicates the category of â€Å"expressionà ¢â‚¬Â by unsteady its location from Carrie Noland is the author of Poetry at billet: Lyric aesthetics and the Chall(a)enge of Technology (Princeton University Press, 1999) and de throw upation and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture (Harvard University Press, 2009). Her taste for interdisciplinary lay down has headed in deuce collaborative ventures: Diasporic Avant-Gardes: look intoal Poetics and Cultural Displacement (Palgrave, 2009), co-edited with Language poet Barrett Watten, and Migrations of Gesture (Minnesota University Press, 2008), co-edited with scissure Ann Ness.She t separatelyes French and comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine, and is an tie in faculty member in the Department of Anthropology, a fellow of the Critical possible action Institute, and director of Humanities-Arts, an interdisciplinary undergraduate major combining the practice and abridgment of art. jump search Journal 42 / 1 summer 2010 47 W ideaivity, understood firstally as a psychic phenomenon, to avatar, understood as a function of locomotion and sensual military somebodynelity (in Franko’s language, â€Å" just nighthing more fundamental than emotion, while just as differentiated” [1995, 80]).Adorno’s Aesthetic hypothesis, at once rough around the edges and sparkling with insights, is arguably the most important book on aesthetics since Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics (1835), the some(prenominal) sprainings that serve as Adorno’s point of departure. The German-born medical specialtyian and philosopher advances along the lines complete by Kant and Hegel, simply he consistently raises questions ab pop art’s function in society. Adorno belonged to a group of early to mid-twentieth-century philosophers who submitted the classical Enlightenment tradition to Marxist revue.Along with Walter Benjam in, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Georg Lukacs, and Bertolt Brecht, Adorno entertained suspicions with ascertain to the speculation of subjective expression; he wondered if the artistic actors lines determine as â€Å" communicative” hadn’t become alter to the point where it was necessary to break them d have got, subject them to permutation, distortion, or â€Å"dissonance” by means of practices he have-to doe withd with the category of â€Å"construction” (Adorno 1970/1997, 40â€44 and 156).Traditionally, â€Å"expression,” he argued, presupposed a self-identical subject to be evince; and if the subject were in fact a reification of something remote more volatile, responsive, and delicate, if the subject were, as he put it, something closer to the â€Å"shudder” of â€Å" soul,” accordingly(prenominal) the nature of â€Å"expression” in artworks would have to be rethought (331).It is non my intent in this essay to conduct a full analysis of Adorno’s guess of expression, nor do I intend to â€Å"apply” Adorno to Cunningham, thereby implying that ace is more theoretically sophisticated than the separate(a)wise. Instead, I want to tutor a propellant engagement amongst the two in an attempt to discern and highlight what I hope to be an early theory of expression that is embedded in Cunningham’s practice and that secretly informs Adorno’s cypher of makebreakingist aesthetics as sound.The theory of expression I am referring to is ane that is non fully articulated in Adorno’s aesthetics. However, unverbalised in his debate with the Kantian tradition is an incipient theory of art’s engagement with the sensorium; nidus on art’s attention to and dialog with the sensory and motor torso produces an aesthetics arguably in conflict with the traditionalistic aesthetics of munificent beauty or the cerebral sublime.This raw(a) t heory of the aesthetic as implicated in kind-hearted embodiment shtup be drawn let on most effectively if we read Adorno in society with watching (and learning more nearly) Cunningham’s jump. Although my concerns atomic number 18 primarily theoretical in nature, I am intrigued by the opportunity to explore how a choreographic and dancing practice can go where aesthetic theory has never g whiz before. Neither the technical, discipline-specific language that Adorno employs, nor the schematic idiom Cunningham prefers, can, in isolation, be do to divulge a persuasive alternative account of expression.However, when the two ar juxtaposed and intertwined, and when practice itself is analyze as theoretically pertinent, and so a new definition of â€Å"expression” begins to emerge. The question that immediately arises when adept juxtaposes Cunningham with Adorno is â€Å"Why doesn’t Adorno ever mention dance? ” Although, as has been well scrolled, so cial professional dancers and choreographers were fellow travelers of the authors and artists Adorno treats, 48 dance Research Journal 42 / 1 summer 2010 e never discusses a single choreographer during the full course of Aesthetic Theory. Dance is simply non part of Adorno’s history, his chronological treatment of modern works; nor is dance included in his theory, his speculations on how artworks relate to what they argon non (nature, material conditions, the homophile subject). Dance still makes a few cameo appearances as the putative origin of all art, a mimetic form related to magic and ritual practices (1970/1997, 5, 329). For Adorno, as for Walter Benjamin, dance coincides with the emergence of art in the caves; it is the earliest practice whereby charitables mime nature and, by miming, interpret, displace, and stylize nature, fifty-fifty as they attempt to become one with it (Benjamin 1986). In their treatments, dance tolerates stuck in that cave, never entire ly modern, because it is more intimately committed to practices related to the organic remains and the sensorium. It whitethorn be that what is intrinsic to dance, its address to the tree trunk, surreptitiously characterizes all the other art forms that putatively emerged out of it. This is a path of head I am currently pursuing. ) For now, it is sufficient to detect that dance cum danceâ€that is, as a tradition of embodied practice that evolves over time, that has its proclaim schools, and that inspires its stimulate critical discoursesâ€never figures as a subject of study in Aesthetic Theory. The diachronic trajectory Adorno establishes for art in generalâ€its increasing autonomy and formalism as a result of industrialization and secular â€Å"disenchantment”â€is neither use to nor tested in any rigorous mode once morest a concrete example of modernist (or any other kind of ) dance.Thus it could be said that, in the unappeasable finger impression, Ad orno ignores dance. At the rattling least, he finds no place for it in modernness. While other scholars have non been as blind to dance’s contri saveions as Adorno, they do have difficulty assimilating it into a standard chronology of twentieth-century art. In Ecstasy and the Demon, Susan Manning sums up the critical consensus: Dance stands in an a-synchronous sexual congress to all other twentieth-century forms of expression.It does non evolve at the rhythm it should, or else the story is more messy than one would equivalent (Manning 1993). For example, we can non say with any certitude that whole meal flour is to wild-eyed ballet as Beckett is to Baudelaire, or as Schoenberg is to Beethoven, or as Malevich is to David. Whereas art, writing, and music all watch outm to fall off through the resembling here and nows at roughly the equivalent timeâ€late Romanticism; early contemporaneity; late modernism or postmodernismâ€choreography appears to rung behind , or follow a different route.A regular rendering is provided by Jill Johnstone, who argues that â€Å" non until Cunningham appeared [in the 1950s] did modern dance catch up with the evolution of visual art traced by Clement Greenberg” (qtd. in Manning 1993, 24). In other words, during the era of cubism, when a constructivist aesthetic was clearly gaining ground in painting, writing, and tuneful newspaper publisher, Isadora Duncan was dormant performing purportedly natural apparent movements and emoting supposedly lyric passions on the supranational stage.My finis here is non to figure out whether Cunningham is modern or postmodern, or why twentieth-century choreography evolved the agency it did. What I want to think most is whether that a-synchronicity, the messier story of dance (and its absence from Kantinspired aesthetics), tells us something about the inadequacy of the Greenberg-Adorno model. How capability Cunningham’s work shed some light on Aesthe tic Theoryâ€its lacunae hardly also its possibilities? How tycoon Aesthetic Theoryâ€despite its inadequaciesâ€be made to say something of honour about dance?Dance Research Journal 42 / 1 summer 2010 49 To approach these areas of questioning intelligently, we must jump recall that Adorno treats modernism non simply as a outcome of increasing self-reflexivity and formalism however also as a struggleâ€explicitlyâ€with expression. His chronology of secular art could be encapsulated in the future(a) focus (and here comes my speed train version of Aesthetic Theory, which I hope summarizes clearly the vital points of the dialectic): The institutional evaluate responsible for late impressionist and consequently cubist rt engenders a suspicion with respect to illusionism; the abandonment of illusionism then heralds the embrace of expressionism as a kind of anticonventionalism (think of the German art drive of the 1920s, the Neue Sachlichkeit or recent Objectivity ); the incidental rejection of psychological narrative and subjective emotion, however, entails a critique of expressionism, which then leads ineluctably to an astringent, accusive constructivism (minimalism, permutational procedures, outlook operations, and so on). At each moment, expression remainsâ€how could it non? but it is reworked through different forms of critique. For Adorno, the tension between expressionism and constructivism becomes paradigmatic of late modernist art. A close adaptation of Aesthetic Theory reveals further that for its author, this tension is fortunate of art itself. The salient points of matchnce between Adorno and Cunningham are that they some(prenominal) show a marked mouthful for construction and they both reject psychological narrative, however they simultaneously rescue expression as an inevitable component of unreal things.In their respective and short single commissions of thinking they both manage to re-define expressionâ€and they do so in surprisingly matched commissions (although this may non at kickoff signal absorbm to be the case). For Cunningham, no bm performed by the homosexual body can ever be lacking in expressive guinea pig, either because the humankind body always communicates some kind of dynamic or because the audience member maps onto the travel body a in-person meaning (see embrown 2007, 53). For Adorno, in contrast, expression in art â€Å"is the antithesis of expressing something” (1970/1997, 112; emphasis added).True expression, he argues, is intransitive verb form verb; there is no object for the verb â€Å"to express. ” As with the verb â€Å"to move,” there is a transitive form: one can â€Å"move furniture” as one can â€Å"express a liquid”â€say, succus from an orange. But when referring to dance (as opposed to painting), to be an intransitive form of expression means that a body must move and thus express without an immateria l object to be expressed. Put differently, the expressive accomplishment is not trying to illustrate anything (even the music).And here is where Cunningham and Adorno converge: an artistic act can be conceived as antinarrative, apsychological, and yet fully expressive. The dance can move its audience without relying on pathos embedded in plot, or energy framed as unconditional emotion. There is no international referent that the body’s motion refers to; it is not expressing more than it is (or, rather, more than it is doing). On this meter reading, expression is borne by a corporealityâ€the moving bodyâ€it can scarcely croak by losing itself.David Vaughan, Cunningham’s archivist, has defined Cunningham’s bewilder in terms that resonate in this mise en scene: â€Å"It goes without saying,” he writes, that Cunningham has not been interested in apprisal stories or exploring psychological carnal knowledgeships: the subject division of his d ances is the dance itself. This does 50 Dance Research Journal 42 / 1 summer 2010 not mean that sport is absent, but it is not drama in the sense of narrative†rather, it arises from the bulk of the kinetic and theatrical reckon, and the human stain on stage. (1997, 7; emphasis added)By â€Å"intensity of the kinetic and theatrical experience,” Vaughan is probably referring to the audience’s experience; he is alluding to John Martin’s notable theory that we, as spectators, empathize kinesthetically with the dancers (a theory developed by Expressionist dancers of the 1920s, or Ausdruckstanz). (He may also be thinking of Cunningham’s same claim that members of the audience are free to enfold their own meaning into the performed motions. ) What is more interesting in this passage, however, is the whim of a â€Å"human accompaniment on stage. What, precisely, does Vaughan mean by a â€Å"human status on stage”? What would a â€Å"human short letter” consist of? How could non-narrative dance produce â€Å"drama” and remain expressive? Expressive of what? To illustrate what a â€Å"human event on stage” might be, how it solicits an intransitive expression, and thus how it illuminates the hidden corners of Adorno’s theory of expression, I want to turn to a extra moment in Cunningham’s development as a choreographer, the stay roughly from 1951 to 1956. During these years, Cunningham was just arising to experiment with the risk procedures he learned from John Cage.The two dances that are most pertinent in this regard are xvi Dances for Soloist and Company of Three, a fifty-three-minute work number 1 presented in 1951; rooms by stake (1952â€1953); and Solo entourage in Time and maculation of 1953, which later became retinue for flipper (performed in 1956). The first one, cardinal Dances, is historic for several reasons: it demonstrated the deflect of Hindi aesthetics , which Cage had been exploring since at least 1946, when he first mentions Ananda Coomaraswamy’s The Transformation of Nature (Nicholls 2007, 36).The go depicts the nine â€Å"permanent” emotions described in the Natyasastra, the consultationbook of Hindu/Sanskrit classical theater. These emotions were, as Cunningham recast them, Anger, Humor, Sorrow, Heroic Valor, the repugnant (or disgust), Wonder, Fear, the Erotic, and Tranquility (or Peace). Moreover, Sixteen Dances (accompanied by a composition Cage wrote bearing the same name) contained what might very well be the first dance date based on the use of come about operations. 4 Thus, Sixteen Dances, the very choreography in which break procedures are introduced for the first time, is explicitly about the emotions and their expression.There is some confusion concerning precisely howâ€and to what extentâ€Cunningham applied chance procedures to Sixteen Dances. However, his comments in â€Å"A Collaborative execute between Music and Dance” and his dry run notes (in the Cunningham pull in at Westbeth) indicate that in at least one segment (the interlude by and by Fear), he used charts and tossed coins to determine the hostel of the straw man periods (phrases), the time intervals, and the orientations and spatial arrangements of the dancers.In â€Å"A Collaborative Process” he writes The structure for the piece was to have each of the dances problematical with a specific emotion followed by an interlude. Although the shape was to alternate light and dark, it didn’t seem to matter whether Sorrow or Fear came first, so I tossed a coin. And also in the interlude after Fear, number 14, I used charts of separate Dance Research Journal 42 / 1 summer 2010 51 movements for material for each of the four dancers, and let chance operations decide the perseverance. (qtd. in Vaughan 1997, 58; qtd. in Kostelanetz 1998, 140â€41).Again, in â€Å"Two Questions and Five D ances,” Cunningham specifies: â€Å"the undivided sequences, and the length of time, and the directions in space of each were discovered by tossing coins. It was the first such experience for me and felt give care ‘chaos has come again’ when I worked in it” (qtd. in Vaughan 1997, 59). It is clear that the first dance Cunningham choreographed entirely through the action of chance procedures was Suite by Chance in 1953. Cunningham’s make accounts of Suite by Chance are much more specific with respect to the use of charts and coin tossing than his accounts concerning Sixteen Dances (Cunningham 1968, n. . ; see also Brown 2007, 39; and Charlip qtd. in Vaughan 1997, 62, 70). Carolyn Brown has indicated that in Sixteen Dances it was the order of the movement phrases that was inflexible by chance, not the individual movements or positions within the movement phrase. 5 The continuity at stake in Sixteen Dances, then, would be the continuity between phra ses, not individual movements. And yet, in an unpublished note from the archive, Cunningham indicates that he was already interestedâ€at least conceptuallyâ€in separating phrases into individual movements and enumerating their various possibilities.In other words, the logic generating his ulterior proceduresâ€the breaking up of phrases into individual movements that were then charted and reproducible into sequences selected by chanceâ€already existed in an embryotic state. Anticipating a practice he would short refine, Cunningham provides the following list of potential movement material in his rehearsal notes: â€Å"Legs can be low, middle or high in air; legs can be bent or straight; legs can be front, side, or back” (Cunningham 1951). The schematic rendering of movement choices (into what he calls â€Å"gamuts of movement”) foreshadows the kinds of taxonomies he would develop later (Vaughan 1997, 72).Photographic representations suggest that at this p oint in his career, Cunningham was still choosing movement material thematically. That is, the types of movement selected for any judgmented(p) emotion had a culturally conventional relation to that emotion. Describing Sixteen Dances, Cunningham writes: â€Å"the solos were concerned with specific emotional qualities, but they were in image form and not personalâ€a yelling warrior for the odious, a man in a chair for the humorous, a bird-masked figure for the terrifically” (qtd. in Vaughan 1997, 59).Unfortunately, there is no video or film record of the dance, but from the extant photographs, it is presumable that Cunningham was working with a modernist wording; there is something resonating of Martha Graham or Ted Shawn in the dramatic poses, the off-centered leaps, and the contracted upper body that we do not see in his work later. In Cunningham’s rehearsal notes (1951) for the pieceâ€and there is no way of knowing if these reflect the completed piece as it was ultimately performedâ€he jots down the idea of introducing a conventional balletic vocabulary for the final intravenous feeding on â€Å"tranquility. â€Å"Finale to proceed from balletic positions, and return key to them at all cadences!!! ” he exclaims. I believe Cunningham so emphatically chooses balletic positions as starting and termination points, as tranquil â€Å"rests,” because they offer movement material that is less associated 52 Dance Research Journal 42 / 1 summer 2010 Photo 2. Merce Cunningham in his Sixteen Dances for Soloist and Company of Three (1952). Photographer: Gerda Peterich. by conventionâ€at least, by Graham conventionâ€with accompaniment emotional states.As Cunningham writes about the period: â€Å"It was almost impossible to see a movement in modern dance during that period not stiffened by literary or personal tie” (qtd. in Vaughan 1997, 69). If â€Å"tranquility,” the ninth emotion from the Natyasastra, signifies the transcendence of emotion, then possibly a ballet vocabulary would be appropriate, especially against the background of the earlier eight, more conventionally expressive, â€Å"images” used for the solos and the erotic duet. During the years 1951â€1956, Cunningham was obviously devising discoveries that would become consistent elements of his practice for years to come.In works such as Sixteen Dances and Solo Suite in Space and Time (1953), not only does he introduce chance operations but he also develops an approach to the body as an expressive organ. He chooses movement material that might be considered conventionally expressive as well as movement material based on classroom exercises, but he elects (or engenders through chance operations) a sequence of phrases or poses that is not conventional. In Sixteen Dances newly minted chance operations discontinue him to experiment with the order of the movement material in a way that endiras the continuity of th e dance. But what he learns by endangering that more conventional Dance Research Journal 42 / 1 summer 2010 53 form of continuity is that another form of continuity can emerge. As he underscores in his rehearsal notes for the 1956 Suite for Five (an extension of Solo Suite in Space and Time with added trio, duet, and quintet): â€Å"dynamics in movement come from the continuity” (Cunningham 1951; emphasis in the original). What would supply this continuity if not the acquired syntax of traditional dance forms, if not the momentum of propulsive movements? all over the course of a year of rehearsals for Sixteen Dances (the time it took to mount the duets, trios, and quartets on Dorothea Brea, Joan Skinner, and Anneliese Widman) Cunningham undercoat his answer. The continuity melding one movement to another would be derived from the dancer herself, that is, from the way she found to string together movements previously not linked by choreographic or classroom practices. In â₠¬Å"Two Questions and Five Dances,” Cunningham describes his pleasure as he watched Joan Skinner take a notoriously difficult sequence of movements and thread them together seamlessly with her own body.Skinner introduced â€Å"coordination, going from one thing to another, that I had not encountered before, physically” (qtd. in Vaughan 1997, 59). His comments introduce what emerges as a constant in his choreography. According to Carolyn Brown, Although the overall intoned structure and tempi were Merce’s, he wanted me to find my own phrasing within the sections. . . . Unlike what happens in ballet, there is no other impetus, no additional source of inspiration or energy, no aural stimulant drug . . . There is only movement, learned and rehearsed in silence.In order for Cunningham dancers to be â€Å"musical,” they must discover, in the movement, out of their own inner resources and innate musicality, what I call, for want of a better word, the â€Å"song . ” . . . There is a meaning in every Cunningham dance, but the meaning cannot be translated into words; it must be experienced kinesthetically through the language of movement. (2007, 195â€96; emphasis in the original) Dynamics are thus not preconceived by the choreographer but instead emerge from the dancer’s creation of unscripted, â€Å"discovered” transitions leading from one movement, or one movement sequence (phrase), to the next.These transitions providing continuity are bad by the dancer’s own act mechanism, her way of assimilating each movement into a new sequence, a new logic, that only the body can discover in the process of repeated execution. In Sixteen Dances Skinner provided him with a crucial insight (reinforced by Carolyn Brown soon after), namely, that the expressivity of the body is lost neither when the elements of an expressive movement vocabulary, a enclothe of â€Å"image forms,” are re-mixed or forcibly dis-articulated , nor when the elements re-mixed are themselves as neutral and burdenless by cultural associations as possible.So what is the â€Å"human situation on stage”â€to return to our earlier questionâ€and in what way can it be considered expressive? I believe that what Cunningham was beginning to uncover in his work during this period, and that he fully realizes in Suite for Five of 1956, is that the human body is doubly expressive: it can be expressive transitively, in an considerably legible, culturally codified way, and it can be expressive intransitively, simply by exposing its dynamic, arc-engendering force. This intransitive expressivity belongs to an animate form responding at what Adorno calls the â€Å"proto” subjective level (1970/1997; 112).That is, the continuity-creating, lintel body is relying on an order of sensorimotor 54 Dance Research Journal 42 / 1 summer 2010 sensitivity that is itself an expressive system, one that underlies and in fact renders po ssible what we draw as the familiar signifying system of conventional expressive â€Å"images” and â€Å"personal” emotions. 7 The â€Å"human situation on stage” can therefore be summed up as a put in of kinesthetic, proprioceptive, weight-bearing, and sometimes tactile problems to be solved. In the rehearsal notes for Suite for Five (1952â€1958), these problems are enumerated succinctly.Cunningham placid this piece by relying on movement materials whose sequences were determined by the imperfections appearing on a canvas tent of paper. (Here, he was imitating Cage, who invented the process with Music for Piano, which accompanied the Solo Suite. ) Cunningham tells us that the dancers had to worry about (1) â€Å"where” they are; (2) â€Å"then where to” (where they have to get to); and (3) â€Å"if more than one person [is] involved,” how the movements they make will be affected by the other’s presence on the stage. In short, the spatial and interpersonal relationships present the problems and constitute the â€Å"human situation on the stage. The dancers are called on not to express a particular emotion, or set of emotions, but instead to develop refined coping mechanisms for creating continuity between disarticulated movements while remaining spiritualist to their location in space. They must keep time without musical cues; sense the presence of the other dancers on stage; know blindly, proprioceptively, what these other dancers are doing; and rectify the timing and scope of their movements accordingly, thereby â€Å"expressing” the â€Å"human situation” at hand.All this work is â€Å"expressive”â€it belongs to the â€Å"category of expression”†insofar as it is demanded by a human situation on a stage and insofar as human situations on stages (or otherwise) constitute an embodied response to the present moment, an embodied response to the absolutely unique condit ions of existence at one stipulation point in time. In an interview with Jacqueline Lesschaeve, Cunningham puts it this way: â€Å"You have to begin to know where the other dancer is, without looking. It has to do with timing, the relationship with the timing. If you paid attention to the timing, then, even if you weren’t facing them, you knew they were there.And that created a relationship” (Cunningham 1991, 22). Relationships, engendering unavoidably the â€Å"human situation,” are defined as body-to-body relationships, or really moving-body-to-moving-body relationships. As Tobi Tobias has suggested, â€Å"perhaps movement is at the core, the body’s response preceding the psyche’s” (1975, 43). Contemporary neuroscience is in fact beginning to confirm this point of view: relationships are forged kinetically, and thus the human drama begins at a prepsychological, perhaps even presubjective level of interaction with the world.The work of An tonio Damasio (1999) and Marc Jeannerod (2006) in particular emphasizes the degree to which largely (although not entirely) nonconscious operations of the sensorimotor systemâ€including visuomotor functions and kinesthetic, proprioceptive, haptic, and vestibular systemsâ€constitute the very conditions of possibility for the emergence of â€Å" high level” processes of conscious thought, symbolization (language), and feeling. These scientists dub the former, more somatic (and evolutionarily prior) class of activity the â€Å"protoself. This protoself is related to homeostasis and the fundamental intelligence that discerns the boundary between the subject’s body and other bodies; it is thus the corporeal substrate of subjectivity understood as an awareness of being a separate self. 8 If we return to Cunningham’s statement, quoted above, we can see that a relationship Dance Research Journal 42 / 1 summer 2010 55 forged simply by occupying the same durati on of time produces a â€Å"human situation” insofar as two bodies are compel to remain aware of each other’s presence.This awareness is not necessarily colored with affect; that is, the â€Å"human situation on stage” is not necessarily charged with emotion. To that extent, we can say that Cunningham’s choreographic procedure attends to intimacies occurring on the level of the presubjective bottom of interaction between human beings; â€Å"presubjective” would not mean pre-individual or pre-individuated but rather singular embodiment in an intersubjective milieu before that embodiment enters a narrative, a conventional, socially defined relation to the other.The relation to the other, as Cunningham points out, is structured by time; in a duet, for instance, the choreographic imperative is that bodies should be doing particular things at particular moments in a determine sequence. Yet at the same time, the cohabitation of that temporal and spatia l dimension that is the stage creates a situationâ€a â€Å"human situation”â€in which two or more bodies must become aware of one another’s movements; they thereby enter into a relation on the â€Å"presubjective,” or prepsychological, level.In Aesthetic Theory Adorno defines precisely this presubjective stage of existence as the origin of expressive look: that is, the prepsychologized body, related in his mind to the human â€Å"sensorium,” is itself the source of expressive content. Beyondâ€or underlyingâ€the explicit, stylised content of artworks is another content: the sensorium’s â€Å"objective” soul, as he puts it, of the touch world that it probes. In their expression, artworks do not observe the impulses of individuals, nor in any way those of their authors”; instead, he continues, artworks are imitation (mimesis) â€Å"exclusively as the imitation of an objective expression” (1970/1997, 111â€12; em phasis added). This objective expression is best captured by the musical term â€Å"espressivo,” he continues, since it denotes a dynamic that is entirely intransitive, â€Å"remote from psychology,” although generated by a human subject.Significantly for our purposes, he adds that the â€Å"objective expression” of subjectivity is continuous with the layer of existence â€Å"of which the sensorium was perhaps once conscious in the world and which now subsists only in artworks” (112). This â€Å"sensorium”â€a â€Å"consciousness” not yet self-reflexive yet nonetheless a consciousnessâ€is composed of a set of receptors relating intimately to the external world.The layer of existence captured by the sensorium may be considered the objective aspect of subjectivity, the world-sensitive, outer-directed, knowledge- rendering, coping body that is the macrocosm on which a psychic subjectivity, a personality, builds. Ultimately, for Adorno, it is the experience of this objective layer of being (the â€Å"consciousness” of the sensorium) that artworks seek to â€Å"express. ” â€Å"Artworks,” Adorno writes, â€Å"bear expression not where they communicate the subject, but rather where they reverberate with the protohistory of subjectivity” (112). other procreative way to think of the relation between the â€Å"protohistory of subjectivity” and expression can be found in the work of Charles Darwin. As unlikely as it may seem, there is a continuum leading from Darwin’s The Expression of the feelings in Man and Animals (1872/1965) through Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception ([1962] where he relies heavily on Darwin for his intellectual of the expressive body), to Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory and its notion of a primordial sensorimotor apprehension captured mimetically in art.Adorno’s sensorial â€Å"consciousness” or â€Å"presubjective” lay er of being in the world looks surprisingly like Darwin’s understanding of â€Å"corporeal intensities”†goodly 56 Dance Research Journal 42 / 1 summer 2010 muscular contractions, accelerated circulation, and their various manifestations on the faces and bodies of animals and man. These â€Å"corporeal intensities” are forms of expressionâ€or â€Å"proto” expression, if you likeâ€that serve as the precondition for the development of more culturally legible, codified expressive gestures (such as the shrivel up or the smile).In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin’s theory of expressivity links the development of what we call emoting to basal neurological and physiological responses generated by a sensorimotor intelligence. What we identify as rage, he writes, is actually caused by a response generated in animals by the involuntary circulatory system; behavior that comes to be designated as anger (for the observer) begins with an accelerated flow of blood, while behavior identified as joy or graphical pleasure is underwritten, so to speak, by the quickening of the circulation.What we identify as â€Å"suffering” is expressed through the contraction of a wide variety of muscle groups. everyplace the course of time, muscular contraction in general comes to be associated with angst, although the specific groups of muscles contracted might go from culture to culture. For instance, one culture might associate suffering with the contraction of the facial muscles, for example, in a grimace. A different cultureâ€or really, a subculture, such as modern danceâ€might associate suffering with the contraction of muscles in the group AB cavity, sternum, and pelvis.In both cases, the adaptive behavior, muscular contraction, can be observed as distinct from the social significations it comes to acquire. Animals and humans both expose behaviors that are closely associated with emotions, but th eoretically it should be possibleâ€and this is Darwin’s goalâ€to dissociate the protosubjective expressiveness of the body (muscle contractions, autonomic responses) from the conventionalized, codified gestures into which this expressivity has been conjugated.Adorno and Cunningham both targetâ€the first to theorize, the second to achieveâ€this primeval order of protosubjective expressiveness contained in, but potentially dissociable from, the conventionalized gestures to which it gives rise. The â€Å"human situation on stage” that is so â€Å"dramatic” or â€Å"expressive” (in Cunningham’s vocabulary) is one in which human bodies have been released from the prefabricated shapes and congealed (â€Å"stiffened”) meanings oblige by a given choreographic vocabulary or gestural regime (qtd. n Vaughan 1997, 69). Cunningham trusts that by preventing the conventional sequencing of movements within a phrase (through the application of chance procedures) he will coax dancers to exhibit dynamics that are at once more â€Å"objective”â€in the sense that they are generated by coping mechanisms rather than emotional statesâ€and utterly idiosyncraticâ€radically subjective, we might say, in the sense that they are generated by the singular body of the dancer confronting an utterly unique â€Å"human situation on stage. In â€Å"The Impermanent Art” (1952), Cunningham comes very close to appellative Darwin’s â€Å"corporeal intensities” when he evokes an order of muscular dynamics released from association with conventional emotions, such as passion and anger. Here he writes that Dance is not emoting, passion for her, anger against him. I think dance is more primal than that. In its essence, in the devastation of its energy it is the source from which passion or anger may issue in a particular form, the source of energy out of which may be channeled the energy that goes into the va rious emotionalDance Research Journal 42 / 1 summer 2010 57 behaviors. It is that blatant exhibiting of this energy, i. e. , of energy geared to an intensity high enough to course steel in some dancers, that gives the great excitement. (qtd. in Vaughan 1997, 86) The â€Å"blatant exhibiting” of an intensified corporeal energy bears a relation to what Darwin calls the exhibition of â€Å"corporeal intensities” by animals that can only be said to be â€Å" irascible” or â€Å"ashamed” if we anthropomorphize their movements.Cunningham seems acutely attuned to what Darwin also notes: our movement to interpret (anthropomorphize) animal behaviors, a tendency he implicitly identifies with the public’s lust to read psychological meaning into the intensified corporealities of the dancers on stage. One could even say that Cunningham attempts to de-anthropomorphize our understanding of human behavior on stage; that is, he wants us to de-reify, to extract f rom the conventionalized, psychologizing modes of dance spectatorship, the movement behavior â€Å"blatantly” exhibited in his choreography.He asks us to experience even the graceful, plangent duet of Suite by Chance without kitschy overlay, as though it were simply an instance of protosubjective expressivity uncovered by two moving bodies implicated in a â€Å"human situation on stage. ” Perhaps not incidentally, Cunningham’s most suggestive evocation of this â€Å"protosubjective” layer of expressivity appears in a passage on animals and musicâ€and it is with this passage that I would like to conclude. Cunningham is talking about his reasons for separating music from his horeography, explaining why he avoids giving his dancers musical cues with which to time the duration of their movements or generate their expressive dynamics. At pains to offer a lordly rendering of what he is seeking, he notes instead that the arctic opposite of what he aspires to in his collaborations with Cage may be â€Å"seen and heard in the music serial the movements of wild animals in the Disney films. [This music] robs them of their instinctual rhythms,” he claims, â€Å"and leaves them as caricatures.True, [the movement] is a man-made arrangement, but what isn’t? ” (qtd. in Vaughan 1997, 10). allow us imagine for a moment the Disney energiser as cave painter, mimingâ€like the â€Å"primitive” dancer of Benjamin’s â€Å"On the Mimetic power”â€the power of the animal totem. In an act of harmonical response, troubling the boundary between mime and mimed, the animator studies the animal, acquiring its rhythmic gait, the expressive dynamic of its way of howling or extending a paw.Without knowing just now what the animal means, how that howl or extension signifies in an animal world, the animator copies, uses whatever conventions and imagesâ€whatever man-made arrangementsâ€she has to approach the original in its presubjective, prepsychologized movement state. That, for Cunningham, is what can be freed through the disruption of continuity, through the hypocrisy of the strict, unforgiving disciplines of permutation and chance.The protosubjective order of the wild gesture is what we might see if it were unencumbered by narrative, if it could be captured without the omnipresent, strip-mall swelling music of the Disney world in which we all too often bathed. Ultimately, the â€Å"human situation on stage” is, despite years of rehearsals and revivals, a set of â€Å"wild gestures” expressing what it is like to be a sensorium moving on stage. The challenge that remains is to determine both how Cunningham’s choreographic practice divulges the work of the proto-self and how that work informs (and is balanced by 8 Dance Research Journal 42 / 1 summer 2010 the exigencies of ) the construction of artworks, that is, the construction of dances for audiences in s pecific historical settings with demands of their own. Another challenge arises with respect to Adorno and my allied regorge of reading dance back into Aesthetic Theory. If, as he claims, artworksâ€not dances, but paintings, sonatas, and poemsâ€â€Å"reverberate with the protohistory of subjectivity,” then where is this â€Å"reverberation” to be located?Where (or when) in the process of art making does protosubjectivity intervene as an agent, as a constituting force? And if, as Adorno implies, we are no longer sensuously alive (â€Å"the sensorium was perhaps once conscious in the world,” he writes), then how do we recognize the presence of the sensorium’s influence on the composition of artworks? What remains of the sensorium in art, of the sensorium in dance? These questions inform the next phase of my research, the contours of which I have only begun to outline.Notes 1. Jose Gil provides several fine articulations of Cunningham’s project in â€Å"The Dancer’s Body” (2002). I agree with Gil that, in an attempt to â€Å"make grammar the meaning,” or â€Å"make body awareness command consciousness” (121), Cunningham â€Å"disconnects movements from one another, as if each movement belonged to a different body” (122); however, I do not believe that the actual dancer ends up with a â€Å"multiplicity of virtual bodies” (123), a â€Å"body-without-organs” (124).As I document later in this essay, Cunningham’s most successful dancers (in his eyes and my own) have been those who are able to take out the movement sequences into their own body; the grammar’s inflection, the sequence’s assimilation through the body’s singular dynamics, is what ultimately lends the dance â€Å"meaning” in the way Cunningham intends. 2. See â€Å"The Impermanent Art,” first published in Arts 7, no. 3 (1955) and reproduced in Kostelanetz (1989) and Vaughan (1997). 3.See especially the appendices to Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. The work was not finished during Adorno’s lifetime (Adorno died in 1969. ) 4. Sixteen Dances for Soloist and Company of Three was first performed in Milbrook, forward-looking York. It contained the following sequence: solo, trio, solo, duet, solo, quartet, solo, quartet, solo, duet, solo, trio, solo, quartet, duet, quartet. See Vaughan (1997, 289). 5. Carolyn Brown, personal conference with the author, June 24, 2009. 6. Cunningham presents what he is getting at as ollows: â€Å"You do not separate the human being from the actions he does, or the actions which surround him, but you can see what it is like to break these actions up in different ways, to allow the passion, and it is passion, to appear for each person in his own way” (qtd. in Vaughan 1997, 10). 7. Mark Johnson (1987) and Daniel cigaret (1985/2000) also believe that our ability to be expressive in the more familiar wayâ€to d isplay human emotions such as anger or pityâ€is predicated on a presubjective capacity to elevate experience into â€Å"image schemata” ( Johnson) or â€Å"vitality affects” (Stern).The neuroscientist Antonio R. Damasio has more recently argued that a protoself, or neural substrate of sensory feedback, is the condition of possibility for emotions per se (1999). What is â€Å"expressed” by this protoself is movement, a nonthematized awareness of orientation, a sense of balance. Cunningham’s choreography appears to be calling on its dancers to â€Å"express” precisely these functions; they are what provide the continuity, the dynamic, that is so moving to watch. On the sensorimotor protoself and our access to it, see my Agency and Embodiment (2009). 8. See Damasio (1999) and Jeannerod (2006).Damasio insists that the protoself is entirely nonconscious, but Jeannerod provides persuasive evidence that kinesthetic awareness is often available to the conscious self. See also Joseph LeDoux (2002) for a similar account. Dance Research Journal 42 / 1 summer 2010 59 Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. 1970/1997. Aesthetic Theory, edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. Translated and introduced by Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1986. â€Å"On the Mimetic Faculty. ” Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writing, edited by Peter Demetz, 333â€36. New York: Schocken.Brown, Carolyn. 2007. Chance and Circumstance: Twenty days with Cage and Cunningham. New York: Knopf. Cunningham, Merce. 1951. Rehearsal Notes. Merce Cunningham Archives, Westbeth, New York City, New York. â€â€â€. 1952â€1958. Rehearsal Notes. Merce Cunningham Archives, Westbeth, New York City, New York. â€â€â€. 1968. Changes: Notes on Choreography. modify by Frances Starr. New York: Something Else Press. â€â€â€. 1991. The Dancer and the Dance: Merce Cunningham in Conversa tion with Jacqueline Lesschaeve. New York: Marilyn Boyars. Damasio, Antonio R. 1999. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness.New York: Harcourt Brace. Darwin, Charles. 1872/1965. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foster, Susan Leigh. 1986. Reading dance: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance. Berkeley: University of California Press. Franko, Mark. 1995. Dancing contemporaneousness/Performing Politics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gil, Jose. 2002. â€Å"The Dancer’s Body. ” In A Shock to Thought: Expression after Deleuze and Guattari, edited by Brian Massumi, 117â€27. London: Routledge. Jeannerod, Marc. 2006. Motor scholarship: What Actions Tell the Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Johnson, Mark. 1987. The Body in the Mind: The natural Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kostelanetz, Richard. 1989. Est hetics Contemporary. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus. â€â€â€, ed. 1998. Merce Cunningham: Dancing in Space and Time 1944â€1992. New York: Da Capo. LeDoux, Joseph. 2002. The Synaptic Self. New York: Viking. Manning, Susan A. 1993. Ecstasy and the Demon: feminist movement and Nationalism in the Dances of Mary Wigman. Berkeley: University of California Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. New York: Routledge. Nicholls, David. 2007.John Cage. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Noland, Carrie. 2009. Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Reynolds, Dee. 2007. Rhythmic Subjects: Uses of Energy in the Dances of Mary Wigman, Martha Graham, and Merce Cunningham. Hampshire, England: Dance Books. Stern, Daniel. 1985/2000. The Interpersonal World of the Infant. New York: Basic. Tobias, Tobi. 1975. â€Å"Notes for a piece on Cunningham. ” Dance Magazine 42 (Septe mber). Vaughan, David. 1997. Merce Cunningham: l Years. Edited by Melissa Harris. New York: Aperture. 60 Dance Research Journal 42 / 1 summer 2010\r\n'