Farmyard Choreographies in Early Modern England (original) (raw)
Related papers
2018
Please see website for details: https://www.creaturelyethicsconferencestream.com The application of a more embodied approach to ethics that also accounts for both animal and animalised humans can be found in the work of Pick (2011), she calls a creaturely ethics that takes the position that living beings, regardless of being human or not, are vulnerable beings prone to violent forces. Her work blurs the divide between the ontological status of both animals and humans, which can be the starting point of our discussions in this stream. Pick believes that individuals and societies have an obligation to try and protect vulnerable beings from violent exposure and exploitation. Drawing on the philosophical writings of Simone Weil, Pick further argues for ‘creaturely poetics’ for ‘the creature, then, is first and foremost a living – body – material, temporal, and vulnerable’ (p. 5). At the same time, vulnerability is not a mundane fact of life. Weil (1953 as cited in Pick, 2011, p. 3) believes that: “[T]he vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is the mark of existence.” At the first instance, it seems counter-intuitive to conceive of the vulnerability of living beings as beautiful, particularly when violence is inflicted upon them. But if, as Pick (2011) argues, “fragility and finitude possess a special kind of beauty, this conception of beauty is already inherently ethical. It implies a sort of sacred recognition (our emphasis) of life’s value as material and temporal” (3). In turn, this understanding of sacredness invites a reverence for the lives of others for it encourages a mode of thought that in our view, is an expansive love, to some even reflecting a form of divine suffering (Linzey, 2009). A type of love born out of the sharing of organizational space (O’Doherty, 2016), inspired by a caring ethic that heightens visibility and moral consideration (Connolly & Cullen, 2017) or ethical affordances (Warkentin, 2009) to other-than-human animals. Arising from this embodied ‘moral imagination’ (Hamington, 2008) which these relationships bring forth, empathy and care can extend beyond previously considered limitations to animals, but also certain groups of humans as well or at some intersection of the two. Afterall, a number of poststructuralist thinkers, such as Derrida (1997/2008, 2009) and Deleuze and Guattari (2004/1987), have emphasised the continuity between human and non-human animals in addition to developing critiques of anthropocentrism. The convenors of this stream welcome submissions that explore the vulnerability of diverse subjects, within multiple contexts and different disciplinary fields of study. This includes disciplines that are not traditionally associated with management and organizational studies, such as anthropology, history, film studies, art, ethnic and racial studies, ecological studies, cultural studies, queer studies, settler and colonial studies, indigenous studies, literature and health care. The overarching aim is to wrestle with the idea of the vulnerability of life and consider the possibility of sustaining ethical relations between beings that are intrinsically motivated by love, but often exists in contexts that are not always conducive to sustaining such relations. Hence, submissions to this stream could consider how an organizational, institutional or industrial context plays some role in hindering and/or facilitating ethical relationships in multiple contexts or settings.
The Dance of Life (Preface and extracts)
The Dance of Life (a vision of the World). The Dance of Life is part 1 of a poetic trilogy that mirrors a tripartite dialectic progression of thesis, antithesis and synthesis leading towards Self-Realisation. This is a journey through time and space. The progression symbolises the binaries of life and death, body and soul, the material and the immaterial, order and chaos, the individual and the collective, in respect to both mankind and its civilisations as they are born, die and are reborn again.
The Petri Dish: Somatic Praxis, Embryology, Becoming in Marie Chouinard’s The Rite of Spring
This paper recontextualizes Rudolf Laban with the Ballets Russes’ Le Sacre du printemps and with Marie Chouinard’s 1993 reinvention of that iconic work in order to rethink early 20th century primitivism. It also recasts Laban as somatic movement practitioner who inspired a century of movement research and proliferation of somatic practices that provide access to deep somatic listening, praxis central to Chouinard’s creative process. Stages, studios and parks in early 20th century Europe and North America flowed with experiments in community movement, representation of faraway lands, and contemporary imaginings of “primitive” pasts. Rather than dismiss early 20th century interest in “the primitive” as fetishizing an absent other, I suggest that this interest is deeply embedded in a concern for community and desire for access to a shared instinctive/animal body, particularly in the face of rapid industrialization, urbanization, and individual isolation. These dual 20th century legacies, Laban’s somatic legacy and Le Sacre du printemps’s artistic legacy, converge in Chouinard’s work. This paper presents Chouinard’s somatic movement praxis, particularly training she provides her dancers in Body-Mind Centering®, Continuum Movement ®, and Action Theater Improvisation, as powerfully resonant with Sacre’s original libretto. She replaces the original narrative with virtuosic deep listening to the body and its environment, and in so doing distills the earlier work’s creative impulse. In 1913 Laban goes back to the land to research community and somatic praxis while Le Sacre’s collaborators go back to an invented agrarian past to provoke their contemporary urban audience. Eighty years later Chouinard joins both of these conversations when she goes back to the body to explore “the very moment after the instant life first appeared.” This paper appears as chapter three of Sentient Performitivities of Embodiment: Thinking alongside the Human, edited by Lynette Hunter, Elisabeth Krimmer, and Peter Lichtenfels.
This paper proposes a working lexicon of care roles and relationships drawn from the fields of dance, kink and healthcare as a choreographic tool. Drawing on dramaturgical sociology, one way to think of care, is as the performance of roles of care-givers and care-receivers. Although care ethics emphasises the particularity of specific care relationships, these relationships are also understood and influenced by roles - such as mother/ son, teacher/ pupil, doctor/ patient - negotiated at a macro-sociological level. These traditional roles may reproduce social injustices and the pace at which they might evolve is often slow and generational. However different kinds of care roles can be invented and negotiated at the micro (face to face) or meso (group) level, for example in professional, sub- or informal cultures. For example in kink practices the term ‘little’ refers to a person adopting submissive, dependent behaviours traditionally presented by a child or pet (without actually pretending to be a child or animal) in relationship to a ‘daddy’ (who may not always be a male) who takes a caring, nurturing role. In medicine a number of secret terms exist to describe patients who may not follow an idealised or traditional professional-patient relationship (for example ‘Albatross’ refers to a chronically ill patient for whom a doctor has long term responsibility). Different choreographic processes can be understood with reference to different choreographer/ dancer roles (for example expert/ instrument, facilitator/ creator) to describe different positions of authority, agency and responsibility. With reference to my own artistic research ‘Hard Care’; work by choreographers Meg Stuart and Hana Lee Erdman; as well as fields of western dance, kink and nursing I will discuss how a lexicon of care roles can be used as a tool of expanded choreography; complexifying and problematising care relationships.
The Rehabilitation of Spontaneity: A New Approach in Philosophy of Action
Philosophy East and West, 2010
I think I could turn and live with animals, they're so placid and self-contain'd, I stand and look at them long and long. They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth. Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself" (Whitman 1959) Love animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Do not trouble their joy, don't harass them, don't deprive them of their happiness, don't work against God's intent. Man, do not pride yourself on superiority to the animals; they are without sin, and you, with your greatness, defile the earth by your appearance on it, and leave the traces of your foulness after you-alas, it is true of almost every one of us! Father Zossima, in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoyevsky 1995, VI, 2g)
Making Kin, Making Trouble: Donna Haraway's Critical Ongoingness
The Annals of Science, 2017
The announcement of a recent screening of Fabrizio Terranova's new film Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival at the Tate Modern Gallery (April, 2017) calls Haraway 'one of the most important living thinkers' of our time. Judging by the global influence of the seven books that precede the two under review here, not to mention the hundreds of articles, lectures, interviews, and other publications, this assessment is not an overstatement. Donna Haraway has, for over thirty years, been at the forefront of science and technology studies: frequently controversial, philosophically iconoclastic and relentlessly feminist, her work is also foundational to (even if she might reject the language of) such emergent fields as biopolitics, posthumanism, new materialism, critical animal studies and multispecies studies. Although there is little sign that Haraway, now officially retired from the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California at Santa Cruz, is slowing down, the almost simultaneous publication of these two books serves as an opportunity both to reflect on the span of her important career and to consider where she is going now: where Manifestly Haraway takes the form of a recollection of, and reflection on, some of her most influential past work, Staying with the Trouble offers a glimpse of the newer paths she is travelling with her formidable analytic and imaginative skills. As the title indicates, Manifestly Haraway brings together the manifestos that marked two particularly important points in the development of Haraway's thinking: the 'Cyborg Manifesto', originally published in Socialist Review in 1985, and the Companion Species Manifesto, published nearly twenty years later in 2003. The former, subtitled 'Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century', was (and is) a radically interdisciplinary intervention into feminist debates about power, identity, economics, corporeality and politics, in which the figure of the cyborgpart organism, part machineserves as a pivot for critical thinking about gendered, classed and racialized human/animal/cybernetic bodies and relations in the context of a Reagan-era 'informatics of domination' characterized by fluidly networked, rather than solidly hierarchical, configurations of power and control. Although clearly a product of its time, the work remains a key text in the development of what is now understood as 'biopolitical' thought. 1 (Haraway, never one to turn down the opportunity for a neologism, rejects the term as a 'flaccid premonition of cyborg politics' (p. 7).) The latter, subtitled 'Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness', is, perhaps, less politically sweeping, but still a powerful intervention into biopolitical relations: emerging from her deep and thoughtful relationships with dogs (particularly with one dog, Cayenne Pepper, an Australian Shepherd, and their shared experience of agility training), this second manifesto focuses more tightly on what it means to live and work together with animal and other 'companion species'. Although, as she writes, 1 Although the term 'biopolitics' was initially coined by Michel Foucault to refer to the historically specific 'entry of life into politics' characteristic of western modernity, the larger idea of societal governance through the organization and management of matters of life and living has been taken up in many different ways in political theory, including by Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Roberto Esposito, Achille Mbembe and, of course, Haraway.