Social Choreography

Social Choreography; ideology as performance in dance and everyday movement, written by Andrew Hewitt, published in 2005 by Duke University Press

Introduction:

page 2
In a sense, it is the history of Schiller's observations that I trace in this book; that is, dance not simply as a privileged figure for social order but as the enactment of a social order that is both reflected in and shaped by aesthetics concerns.

page 3
My central presupposition in this book is that Schiller's project of what I will call social choreography has been historicized and depoliticized by a prevailing modernist understanding of choreography as an essentially metaphysical phenomenon oriented around questions of transcendental subjectivity rather than social and political intersubjectivity. What is at stake in proposing an analysis of social choreography is a threefold determination of the modern: namely, a redefinition of modernism as an aesthetic program; a rethinking of modernization as a social process of rationalization that would not, as is generally assumed, compartmentalize and trivialize aesthetic experience; and, finally, a rethinking of the relationship of two terms―aesthetic modernity and socialpolitical modernity― that have either been taken to be irremediably at odds or assumed to be reducible to each other.

page 3
In the moment of the dance, the possibility of a movement beyond the limitations of the body is paradoxically embodied; human potential supposedly resides as much in the vital energies that move and display the body itself. In this study, by contrast, I use the term social choreography to denote a tradition of thinking about social order that derives its ideal from the aesthetic realm and seeks to instill that order directly at the level of the body.

page 4
The aesthetic will function― and here we encounter the importance of the performative within our notion of social choreography―as a space in which social possibilities are both rehearsed and performed.

page 5
These possibilities have been well rehearsed and debated by the Left. In taking dance merely as the most aestheticized form of social choreography, however, I wish to move beyond that debate to ask how we might understand the relationship between the political and aesthetic when the prevailing paradigm for art is performative― that is when we focus on the dynamics of the “work” of art as a system of production, rather than on the artifact itself. What, precisely, will the politics of dance, or social choreography, mean in the end? Are we talking metaphorically, or are there more substantive entailments? How do various notions of choreography correspond with, derive from, or reflect political ideologies or social conditions? Can we talk on a “aesthetic ideology” without rooting it in a political one? My argument here will be that dance has served as the aesthetic medium that most consistently sought to understand art as something immanently political: that is, as something that derives its political significance from its own status as praxis rather than from its adherence to a logically prior political ideology located elsewhere, outside art. In short, we are not talking metaphorically. When we talk of an “aesthetic ideology” we talk not of an ideology of the aesthetic but refer instead to the intrinsic aesthetic component of any ideology that seeks to structure itself in narrative form. Thus, the aesthetic component of ideology is the utopian lure that enables that ideology to operate in a hegemonic rather than a simply coercive fashion.

page 8
By schematizing somewhat we can distinguish between studies that seek to “read” the body as text and rely on “a vision of the body's movement as an act of writing” and those that argue, with Peggy Phelan, that “to attempt to write about the undocumentable event of performance is to invoke the rules of the written document and thereby alter the event itself...The labor to write about performance (and thus to “preserve” it) is also a labor that fundamentally alters the event.”

page 9
Rather than taking text as a model for reading performance I propose instead to take performance as a challenge to our model of “reading texts.” To question the status of a dance interpretation on the grounds that it is, after all, a trope or a certain approximation of interpretive reading strategies is to naturalize the act of reading itself as non-metaphoric, as the hegemonic medium for the production of meaning. A study of social choreography entails opening up to the many different ways in which meaning is produced in both aesthetic and social arenas.

page 10
Our task, then, must be to develop a critical hermeneutic that eschews the undialectical “materiality” of the body on the one hand, and the vitalist celebration of “force” or “movement” on the other. We need a semiotic that articulates their interactions and collisions. The critical challenge is to marry text-based analysis to the analysis of performance; a challenge that is not simply for dance historians but also for those cultural historians who wish to learn from dance and who are dissatisfied with their discipline's tendency to reduce aesthetic phenomena to the status of document, to its simple sociological determinants.

page 11
What I am calling “choreography” is not just a way of thinking about social order; it has also been a way of thinking about the relationship of aesthetics to politics. In other words, as a performative, choreography cannot simply be identified with “the aesthetic” and set in opposition to the category of “the political” that it either tropes or predetermines.

page 11
Rather than being interested in questions of how the metaphor, or even the practice, of choreography resolves problems of metaphysical subjectivity, this study will concern itself instead with the historical emergence of choreography (within modernism broadly defined) as a medium for rehearsing a social order in the realm of the aesthetic.

page 12
In his study The Aesthetic State: A Quest in Modern German Thought Josef Chytry notes how “according to Schiller, dance symbolizes wholeness of the psyche; beauty is developed 'through the free play of limbs' that represents harmony between individual freedom and group order.”

page 13
“As is clear from Schiller's formulation,” he [Josef Chytry] writes, the aesthetic “is primarily a social and political model ethically grounded in an assumedly Kantian notion of freedom...The 'state' that is here being advocated is not just a state of mind or of soul, but a principle of political value and authority that has its own claims on the shape and limits of our freedom.”

page 14
I wish to demonstrate how choreography has served not only as a secondary metaphor for modernity but also as a structuring blueprint for thinking and effecting modern social organization: it is not only a secondary representation but also a primary performance of that order.

page 15
At what point, for example, does simple movement become dance? To answer this question by saying that, in the end, all dance is really just movement; or, on the contrary, that all movement is choreographed and, in some sense, pre-scripted ideologically, is simply to dodge the question.

page 19
In the first half of the volume, by contrast, a critical choreography traces the movement of bodies through social space and further examines the ways in which an idealized body negotiates that space and further examines the ways in which an idealized body negotiates that space according to bourgeois political and aesthetic theory.

page 19
To examine choreography thus is necessarily to follow two trajectories: one tracing the ways in which everyday experience might be aestheticized (dance aestheticizes the most fundamental and defining motor attributes of the human animal); and another tracing the ways in which “the aesthetic” is, in fact, sectioned off and delineated as a distinct realm of experience. This is what I mean by the aesthetic continuum of social choreography.

page 21
These two models of social order―performative and mimetic―will frame my readings in this book. A mimetic aesthetic ideology would be one in which the artistic representation of a better life serves to blind the audience to the social realities in which they live. In this model, art clearly serves as an antidote in Marcuse's sense of an “affirmative culture.” Aesthetic satisfaction in the mere “symbol” of a social utopia distracts us from the political praxis necessary to bring that utopian condition about in reality. Art serves as a sop for unrealized political action. This would, indeed, be ideology as false consciousness or false representation. (After all, what would be the real political context of an English dance at this point in history?) What I am calling the performative or integrative aesthetic ideology, meanwhile, is one in which art does not simply misrepresent, in a palliative manner, an existing social order. Instead, the aesthetic now becomes the realm in which new social orders are produced (rather than represented) and in which the integration of all social members is possible. Whereas the mimetic ideology approximates a traditional model of ideology as false consciousness, the performative would be something more like a political unconscious, except that the performance of ideological work by the body moves us out of the very paradigm of consciousness in which the distinction true/false, conscious/ unconscious, and so forth hold sway.

page 24
All feeling for the body had died out and so, in a quite touching way, the stage became a place to celebrate an ideal of what had been lost in reality. The bourgeois' tired organicism sought to fascinate itself and whip up its atrophied instincts through an extreme physical exertion of which it was otherwise no longer capable.

page 25
Dance is a process of work that produces now work or artifact as residue.

page 26
The very fact that dance does not produce a “work” or artifact to mark the fact that work had taken place particularly suited it to an aesthetic ideology of modernism that sought to obscure the materiality of work in its own productions. There is a fantasy of pure energy at play here that parallels a capitalist fantasy of pure profit, pure production. Dance became a preeminent aesthetic form during the modernist period not only because it exemplified those conditions of modernity famously identified by Baudelaire―the material and contingent―but because it equally effectively sublated them. The figure of the dancer―rather than a notion of socially embedded choreography―resolved a fundamental cultural contradiction of capitalism. It exemplified social modernity, as a reliance on pure energy and progress, and aesthetic modernism, as autonomous play, in ways that other forms apparently could not.

page 27
Thus, for example, Belinda Quirey, a historian of forms of popular dance has even noted of the waltz―the nineteenth century's definitive contribution to social dance―that it “is basically a work rhythm. It was the first work rhythm that we ever accepted above a level of folk dance...

page 28
To contemporary observers, the dance craze [of 1910-11] also seemed to presage the more visceral “craziness” of the war to follow. As a German critic of dance and body culture in general noted at the time: “The great dance epidemic that was merely suppressed by the war and broke out again all the more violently at war's end has something of that melancholy audaciousness that imbues all moribund epochs.”

page 28
The round dance signaled the end of the art of dance, insofar as it might be said to have existed. At least as long as it had been performed only by a gifted few, even social dance had remained a spectacle. After the rococo, when a cohesive style had, as in ancient times or in the Renaissance, completely unified an era for the very last time, the epoch of literature, science, and technology set in; a bourgeois epoch in which all bodily imagination was banished by an increased emphasis on the intellect. Dance no longer sought to stand above the world and give it expression through the spectacle of movement; it became a form of general social entertainment.

page 33
The waltz was scandalous precisely because it no longer rehearsed new possibilities of social order―in the manner of social choreography―but served merely to demonstrate the schism between public and private and the dual or split function of men in each. In the words, once again, of Hans Brandenburg: with the waltz, “democracy, the bourgeoisie, emotion carried off the victory...The waltz was able to make available on an unprecedented scale the sheer joy of dancing, unleashing a veritable ecstasy of dance, an international mass psychosis, simply because its rhythm contains an impulse toward movement the likes of which had never before been experienced. It contained the rhythmic formula for all the pleasures of the dance.”

page 34
The dance craze of 1910-11 (its contemporaneity with the success of the Ballet Russes is, of course striking) might now seem to us to have consisted of an eccentric variety of contrived and difficult dances, but―as a historian of popular dance observes―as soon as the craze spread, a simplification of steps became necessary: “The steps in fact were of no importance and could be learnt by anyone, young or old, able to walk in time with the music...Up to 1910, no matter what the dance, the main attraction lay in actual steps, and in some cases, the exhilarating movement. After 1910, the main attraction was unquestionably the rhythm; and from now on the rhythm was to inject all our dance forms with an entirely new force.”



Chapter 1
The Body of Marsyas; Aesthetic Socialism and the Physiology of the Sublime

page 38
Instead of questioning the accepted dance historical narrative of nineteenth-century decline on empirical grounds, I wish to recast the question in the broader terms of social choreography. What structures of social experience were being theorized or projected in an almost subterranean discourse on choreography, even as dance itself seemed to languish as a high cultural form? I would argue that there was a migration of cultural interest in dance away from the “high” cultural forms toward the newly emerging forms of public amusement and mass entertainment, on the one hand, and toward an emerging discourse of anthropology on the other. The idea of choreography retained its importance, I will argue, by virtue of a fundamental shift in its significance. In brief, my thesis here is that the nineteenth century saw a shift in writings on dance from a Schillerian concern with “play” as the (pre)condition of human freedom to reflections on “work” or “labor” as (respectively) the realization or the alienation of embodied human potential. By the end of the century, the ideal of choreographed labor had become an important component both in social modernization and in the aestheticization of social and political thought. I argue that by the late nineteenth century, reflections on dance centered around the question of work in two important ways.

page 39
In short, is dance more, or less, legitimate as a form of art because it produces no object?

page 40
The social order implicit in Schillerian dance was no longer relevant to a century in which modernization would turn on the emergence of technology and the rational operation of a technological rather than simplistically “democratic” order. Spencer is concerned with the absence, in savage societies, of any theatrical dance. The social differentiation necessary to establishing a class of dancers―necessary, one might say, to the institutionalization of the aesthetic―is lacking, thereby serving as a signal of a society's backwardness. Thus, we might argue that from Spencer's perspective the reappearance of dance in the early twentieth century as a highly specialized and professionalized phenomenon―in the form of the Ballet Russes―reflects a process of discursive rationalization that both isolates the aesthetic and deploys social and performative distinctions to reconfigure social order.

page 40
A wide variety of late-nineteenth-century labor theorists turned to the example of dance in their writings to explicate their notions of a natural labor that might harness and regenerate labor power rather than simply use it up.

page 43
Dance was of interest because it promised―or threatened―a human laboring subject deprived of will. In other words, if thinkers and artists on the Left criticized alienated labor as unfree, anthropological research at the same time suggested that dance―which had been used to figure free, organic activity―was, in fact, unfree because it involved no activity of will.

page 47
Certainly, one does find examples of utopian dance in the nineteenth-century aesthetic socialist tradition, most notably in the organization of social entertainment of the Owenite working communities, but in such instances the socializing powers of dance derives, almost without exception, from its troping of labor. Looking forward to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I will argue that it is precisely this shift from the paradigm of play to the paradigm of work that made possible dance's extraordinary aesthetic renaissance in the writings of Mallarmé and in the performances of the Ballet Russes.

page 48
...it is, indeed, remarkable to note how closely a set of aesthetic criteria derived from a classical precedent and encoded in the traditional distinction between “musical” and “plastic” arts fit the new social and economic conditions of the nineteenth century. In a nutshell, a long-established tradition of aesthetic theory held that “plastic” arts were those that worked in space, whereas “musical” arts operated in the medium of time. Effectively, terminologies derived from the debate in aesthetics―and articulated around the scandalous form of dance―provide a framework for thinking about the development of labor and capitalism throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century: this is characteristic of aesthetic socialism. On the few occasions where dance is addressed directly in this tradition of thought it figures either as a utopian model of social order and nonalienated production or as a troubling premonition of the shift from artisanal to “energetic” models of labor; in other words, as the manifestation of an abstract, alienating, yet anthropologically grounded Arbeitskraft. Because dance confounds most of these criteria―it is a “plastic” art that nevertheless works in and through time.

page 49
My claim, however, is that it was precisely the nature of materiality that was being contested in the discourse traced here, and that simply to assume the primacy of “matter” to those discourses is to think materiality in an undialectical way. In brief, I will argue that the discursive formulation of materiality in the nineteenth century was heavily influenced by aesthetic terminologies inherited from the eighteenth century and that the aesthetic cannot, therefore, be thought of merely as a secondary discourse acting on or staging an already preestablished, preaesthetic materiality. More than this, I will argue that precisely those discourses that sought to abstract a concept of materiality from its specific aesthetic instantiations finally effected the most fundamental “aestheticization” of matter.

page 60
Whereas music is consistently evoked in Ruskin's writings as a metaphor for social, order―or, rather, as its pedagogical inculcation―a social choreography tends to emerge at precisely those moments where the possibility of a disorder is considered.

page 63
Because labor produces no object, it does not allow for the subject's confrontation with, and reflection on, his own activity in objective form.

page 63
Labor is “unalienated” because the performance of labor does not yet demand a self-conscious human subject: but, by the same token, it is animalistic because the absence of an object denies man the possibility of becoming a subject in contradistinction to that object.

page 63
In “work,” the objectifying split―or “alienation” in the technical rather than the political or economic sense―of the subject comes about. I can now know myself and my actions through the objects I produce―that is, through objects “alien” to me yet nevertheless embodying my labor.

page 64
By putting the entire body in motion, dance figures a movement beyond the manufactural and opens up the possibility of a totalizing―if not, indeed, totalitarian―model of social order.

page 65
Work is important not only because it privileges the moment of production―this it would share with “labor”―but because it includes the possibility of contemplation and rest.

page 65
Beauty, for Morris, consists both in the product of labor and in the activity of labor itself―but it is only the existence of the object that allows for a retroactive enjoyment of the labor that went into its production.

page 70
What I want now to suggest is that both in the “enthusiastic” musical modes and in the anthropological and sociological writings with which I opened this chapter, the possibility of a physiological sublime is being explored as a mode of self-perpetuating social choreography. This social vision is linked to the rise of vitalistic Lebensphilosophie, whose forms it rehearses in the realistic realm. Although the sublime would normally be that which man imagines beyond specific historical embodiment, I am arguing that the body itself increasingly comes to figure that historically unfigurable possibility. By invoking a notion of “the physiological sublime” I wish to suggest the removal of all limit and definition from the subject to the degree where man is subsumed not by his ideal humanity but by the vital, muscular energies and “vibrations” that pass through him.


Chapter 2
Stumbling and Legibility; Gesture and the Dialectic of Tact

page 78
Having suggested in previous chapters ways in which social choreography informed the project of nineteenth-century aesthetic socialism, I now wish to locate such social visions within a broader Enlightenment tradition of thinking about the relation of the physical body to the body politic. That is, here I will begin to examine the choreographic in its second dimension―as not only a disposition of bodies in social space but as a way of educating the individual body in its experience of itself and in its movement toward language as an expression of that experience.

page 84 – 86
I wish to show how a concern with gesture became a unifying cultural phenomenon. . . .we would immediately confront the question of gesture and gesticulation both as a philosophical figure and as a historically determined articulation of the body. . . .I would simply point out that gesture, as gesticulation, is already a problematic phenomenon. It is not a product of but rather a replacement for a lost mimetic capacity. . . .Gesture, then, would be the mode of passage from direct to indirect communication. It involves putting the body on display, and thus the most fundamental gesture is the simple act of self-presentation: the promenade.

page 86
Rousseau exemplifies in this essay [Essay on the Origin of Languages] what we might call a “dialectic of tact” in which rhetorical tactfulness enables a semblance of seamless social integration, but only in the face of a loss of actual tactile interaction. Gesture is already a mediated form of communication that comes into play with the demise of direct touching―politics “within arms length”―as a feasible practice. When communities can no longer embrace themselves quite literally, they resort to gesture. To study gesture, then, is to study instances of a failure to connect. Thus, the most basic of gestures would be the gesture that signifies the lack of connection, the gesture that displays its own failure in direct physical connection.

page 89
It is stumbling, not falling or walking, that is at the heart of Balzac's study of the démarche. He is concerned with how order and system are grounded on parapraxis rather than seeking, like Rousseau, some moment of immediate physical communication. Where Balzac does begin to expatiate on the refining of physical representation, his essay quite explicitly shifts gears into a consideration of elegance: that is, he envisages as a willed aesthetic construct that which Rousseau posits as an historical origin―a certain state of grace. This is what makes Balzac's study so important for those who seek to resist the aestheticization of politics: for while it recognizes the aesthetic endeavor as the basis of the social collective, it refuses to ground that political aesthetic in a moment of pure communication and communitarian self-immanence.
Stumbling needs to be thought of not as a loss of footing but rather as a finding of one's feet: it is the act in which the body rights itself by a rétraction and the mind becomes aware of the operation of measure and balance―”a secret force”―operating in and through the body. To reflect on what it means to walk is necessarily to reflect on what it is to profess a science.

page 96
In essence, Balzac's move toward an aesthetic concern with deforming habit marks a methodological shift away from a reading of gesture and démarche as mimetic, semiotic, or reflective instants toward a concern with the epideictic or performative nature of gesture; a concern, that is, with what gestures enact rather than with what they represent.

page 100
Laughter, then, reveals the mechanisms at the very heart of the human, debunking the organicist tendencies of Bergson's vitalism. Moreover, the group formation necessary to laughter vitiates another of his crucial distinctions. Laughter is infectious in an almost literal sense―it is communicated from body to body: “How,” Bergson asks, “should it come about that this particular logical relation, as soon as it is perceived, contracts, expands and shakes our limbs, whilst all other relations leave the body unaffected?”. When we laugh we do not, in fact, raise ourselves to the level of pure contemplative intellect but rather yield to a physical reflex passed on by the bodies of others. If we recall (from Rousseau) that gesture is inaugurated at the precise point when bodies can no longer directly communicate with each other by touch, this logic of contagion acquires an ideological significance: it articulates a quasi-pathological fantasy of immanent bodily community.

page 103
Whereas the Körperkultur tradition of naturism and gymnastic dance would see in rhythmical movement free play of a centered and self-centering subject―élégant in Balzac's terms―a Bergsonian reading allows us to understand how the privileging of rhythm and elasticity as the virtues and competences of a centered subject, we might also read them as foreclosing that minimal fixation or habitude constitutive of character. In such a reading, the demand for flexibility would approximate Arendt's condition of labor rather than the agonistic intersubjectivity of action or the objectivity of work.

page 104
The slippage from action to gesture is a movement from intention to automation―the sign of a new “techno-cracy.” A gesture that was legible―physiognomically, in the eighteenth-century tradition―bespoke the persistence of a subject. If stumbling is to be understood as the debacle of the gesture―the fall out of action into gesture as a mode of bodily experience―we face two possibilities. Either the gesture is to be read counterintentionally, as parapraxis; or we need to examine the possibility of a loss of gesture―a complicated spastic body―in which the hegemony of the social is figured by a return to the somatic.

page 111
It is not fanciful, I think, to see the appeal of Delsartism―with all its contradictions―to the specific situation of late-nineteenth-century America. In the land of the melting pot the idea of universal bodily language is clearly attractive, while at the same time posing a threat to the privilege of the literate classes. We all speak different languages but maybe there is one universal language of the body that would be democratic.

page 115
One is reminded of the definition of though from the Encyclopédie that serves as epigraph to this chapter. Touch is the sense that establishes us as something other than “automatons that have been dismantled and destroyed.” The skin―that which has been stripped from the flayed body―is the very organ of the tactile. At the point where vital forces are revered as mere principles rather than as embodied historical realities, respect for both bodies and subjects ceases.


Chapter 3
“America makes me sick!”; Nationalism, Race, Gender and Hysteria

page 117
By drawing on the writings of modern dance's early proselytizers in the United States, I argue for the emergence of a new aesthetic order in the early twentieth century, one in which choreography acquired an important―indeed, predominant―role as the privileged form of what we might call a “postliterate” culture. I seek, then, not simply to shift along the aesthetic continuum from consideration of social choreography to a consideration of dance in the more aesthetic sense, but rather to highlight a moment when the aesthetic realm acquired a particular importance in the resolution of essentially nonaesthetic problems of political self-presentation in modern democracy.

page 118
In the realm of cultural politics, meanwhile, a nation―America―would finally find its adequate aesthetic expression in dance By overlaying these three ideological structures―language, aesthetics, and politics―I aim not to provide concrete historical context but rather to suggest a third way for thinking about historical determination with respect to cultural phenomena.

page 121
To what extent and in what way can dance “embody” nation​​? And what is the significance of the shift from predominantly literary and philological figurations of cultural nationhood in the nineteenth century to a Whitmanian singing and, finally, to the performances of figures such as Isadora Duncan?

page 122
In the words of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, quoted by Novalis in this chapter's epigraph, the very status of American nationhood differs from that of other nations: “America is here or nowhere”―it is a perpetually present state, an ideology of perpetual presence. Thus, I will argue here that a certain narrative of aesthetic discovery was modeled on a narrative of the discovery of America, and I will present what I take to be some of the more important aesthetico-political consequences of such parallels. In looking at the specific social choreographies constituted through American modern dance, I wish to take literally this notion of a “shift” (from representation to performance) and to examine the narrative of aesthetic discovery whereby the perpetual “here” that is America is located. Obviously the possibility of a non-mimetic self-performative identity―implicit in the shift from literate to performative cultures―was particularly attractive to a nation grounded in the ideology of self-creation, a perpetually young nation sentimentally oriented toward the future rather than toward the representation of its past. Notwithstanding the importance of Germany in twentieth-century dance history, I will argue that the hegemony of a certain formalism in modern dance reflects America's desires to figure itself through dance not as one nation with its own characteristic aesthetic demands, but as the locus of both a historical and an aesthetic realization of nation and art in their very essence. In “America” a certain understanding of dance's very preconditions is completed as an aesthetic trope for a concomitant end of history.

page 123
As an ideology of substantive physical and moral purity, however, it calls for the display and purification of the body. This, I will argue, poses a dilemma in any understanding of American modernism―a set of forces pulling in opposing directions, toward abstraction on the one hand and toward the figuration of a (purified or aestheticized) body on the other―between, that is, the representation and figuration of purity and the iconoclastic purification “from” all representation.

page 123
The structuring paradox both of this chapter and of Isadora Duncan's own ambiguity toward her nationality. As Daly again points out: “Despite―or because of―her self-imposed exile (she left for Europe in 1899, at the age of twenty-two) Duncan was fundamentally informed by the idea, if not the reality, of her homeland.” Such a contrarian but sentimental relation to one's homeland is not, indeed, that unusual, but Duncan's “porgressivist” ideology makes the final turn into reactionary and racist thinking precisely at the point when the division between “the idea” and “the reality” is erased; that is at the point where her discourse is informed by a certain “idea of the reality” of America. This stage in Duncan's thought is clearly marked by the emergence of tropes of “reality”―geography and race, specifically―in her later writings.

page 124
That America's self-actualization will mark not a coming speech but a movement beyond language is vital, for what makes American dance general is its movement beyond any need for translation, its very physical immanence.

page 125
The myth of American self-actualization through art and the myth of the arts' own systematic self-reconciliation (i.e., the overcoming of the schism between musical and plastic arts in dance) are linked in such a way as to suggest a historical and aesthetic idea of manifest destiny. History can in fact be located―in America―in the movement of its completion: just as time folds into space in dance, history will fold into America. As we shall see, Martin is led to posit a universalism of the body that runs counter to a secondary critique of aesthetic and political colonialism in his work.

page 125
According to this notion, “when we see a human body moving, we see movement which is potentially producible by any human body and therefore by our own; through kinesthetic sympathy we actually reproduce it vicariously in our present muscular experience”.

page 127
Martin envisages the body as a medium rather than material when it comes to American dance, while recognizing that “any theory of dance that attempts to make use of the body as an instrument of pure design is doomed to failure for the body is of all possible instruments the least removable from the associations of experience”. In other words, despite its orientation toward production and performance rather than reference, purely abstract dance is never possible because the medium itself―the human body―functions as a trace of the foreclosed figure of the specific. Distinguishing American dance from German ideals of absolute dance, Martin notes of the former that “it has never confined itself, even in its most experimental period, to absoluteness. Indeed, it could not do so from its very nature, for the movement of the human body is inevitably associated with experience and cannot be made into an abstraction of line and form under any circumstances”.

page 127
What is “specifically” American, in other words, is American's passage―through the specific medium of the dancing body―beyond historical specificity. Martin's materialist idealism is inflected by an idealist materialism: the body becomes the locus of humanity beyond national cultural limitations. What this means, of course, is that America―for which dance is a natural and adequate aesthetic expression―takes as its specificity the general itself: humanity. While modern dance will be American, its very physicality will make it international.

page 130
“The whole idea of national art is, of course, abysmal nonsense”, and even if it were not, America, as a colony, had been deprived of the right to lay claim to self-identity through art. The claims of America―any claims made in the name of America―are necessarily the claims of the heretic. To embrace one's identity as an American, therefor, one must first pass through a rejection of identity itself as a culturally coherent totality. Dance―as a preparatory and performative rather than denotive art form―is itself heretical: it invokes and yet defers identity as something tentative in need of being produced rather than as something self-evident in need only of finding adequate representational form.

page 139
The notion that men know and woman embody is to be found again and again in late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century sociological, sexological, and aesthetic writings, but now the opposition acquires new ideological significance. Now, for the first time in America the nation is “here” rather than “there,” experienced immanently rather than posited ideologically. As an embodiment of this new conception of nation, the female body acquired new significance. Pointing the way into a new century, yet still imbued with the romantic connotations of an old one, the body of woman serves as a vehicle―a non figurative vehicle, we should stress, because this is not simply a question of a shift in tropes―for this new experience of nation.

page 142
poses plastiques. . . .The semiotic fluidity of dance would not provide the “stable translations” necessary for social and national cohesion, and so dance needs to organize itself around fixed posed and attitudinizing.

page 143
The question raised by this overlaying of Freud is essentially semiotic. How do bodies signify, and how do different bodies signify differently? Does this newly foregrounded bodily function of national representation shift us out of the possibility of “metaphor” in general and into a hysteric realm of nationalism? In other words, perhaps the “connections between the individual body and the collective body” that Susan Manning rather loosely identifies as the basis of choreography's ideology cannot be imagined simply along the lines of a symbolic representation. Indeed, the terminology of national self-identity already pervades Freud's understanding of hysteria when he argues that we need to treat traumas like “a foreign body” that enters our system and continues to work. Duncan's literal “sickness” at America allows us to think of vomiting as an expulsion of foreign bodies that both expels and enacts the hypersymbolic function that has taken control of us. The problem is that these traumas alienate us from our own bodies by making them the ground of a symbolization we no longer control. It makes our own body foreign. This is why we need to pursue the abject relations suggested in Duncan's literal nausea. If our hypothesis is true and hysteria becomes the condition of new national ideologies we need to face some troubling consequences. This dilemma od this new American “embodied” nationhood lies in a both implicitly and explicitly racial “urge to purge” that only serves to alienate us from our own American body.

page 153
“I believe there is a place in history of dancing for the couple dance,” Ted Shawn writes in The American Ballet, “but when social dancing has entirely degenerated into couple dancing, it is a very sad time for the art of the dance”. While the relationship of theatrical to social dance has been theorized in terms of the relation of high to low, elite to mass culture, Shawn's theatrical elitism should be seen as something more than a simple aesthetic position. It is also a social critique: for “if we consider the true meaning of the word 'social,' ” Shawn argues, “these dances are most decidedly not social and are almost anti-social”. The heterosexual imperative, he argues, actually works against the formation of broader social collectives by subtracting individuals from the group and pairing them off on the dance floor. The social vision embedded in so-called social dancing is inappropriately heterosocial, he will argue: “The wooing and courtship theme in life has its place, and a very important place, but it should not absorb all of our life...I believe that in this factory age, when so many people are doing routine things―take as an example the workers in a Ford factory . . . [that] man needs something better as a dance, to release his pent-up creative instinct”. The critique seems startlingly “queer” avant la lettre. Shawn is examining the ways in which an emerging commodity culture exemplified by the new dance craze not only reinforces the hegemony of a new monopoly capitalism but also normalizes and aestheticizes the heterosexual contract.


Chapter 4
The Scandalous Male Icon; Nijinsky and the Queering of Symbolist Aesthetics

page 159
At first sight, there might seem no more mimetic medium of signification than the icon. Like photographs or portraits, iconic representations relate to their referents by a system of mimetic similarity that seemingly denies all autonomy to the signifier. To this extent, nothing would seem less suited to modernism's orientation toward abstraction and linguistic play. From such a perspective, the iconic would seem hopelessly comprised by its dependence on representation and figuration. However far removed the icon might seem from the logic of abstraction we normally identify with modernism.


Chapter 5
From Woman to Girl; Mass Culture and Gender Panic

page 178
Moreover, it is clear that this periodization is necessarily tied to questions of gender and the varying new “typologies” of femininity being exported from the United States. The response to American social experiments in acceptable gender roles was particularly pronounced in Germany, where, for example, the absence of any serious ballet tradition allowed progressive thinkers to respond much more enthusiastically and unequivocally to Duncan than was the case in neighboring France, where ballet―however decrepit―had an institutional history. Likewise, late emergence of Germany as an industrial nation meant that enthusiasm for the forms of American mass culture, such as the Tiller Girls, resonated with an indigenous national project of rapid and belated modernization in ways that would have been difficult elsewhere in Europe.

page 178
Germany was the place where the empty rituals of mass culture might be reconnected with a cultic, mythic value, where a rational―and rationalizing―modernity might encounter its radical, irrational, mythic.

page 179
The predominance of performative, ritual, and choreographic modes of social cohesion in a given society does not necessarily lead to the emergence of a critical vocabulary for articulating or critiquing that society's choreography. Indeed, it seems that some distance―the distance of cross-cultural transmission and translation, perhaps― is necessary if such a critical discourse is to arise. To argue that specific societies are highly aestheticized (either in their self-conception or in their de facto practices) is not the same thing as arguing that such societies produced a sociological discourse of “social choreography” adequate to the elaborate forms of performance that imbue them. Quite the contrary; it is only when a certain choreography breaks down, in periods of transition, that the operation of choreographic norms and conventions becomes explicit and a critique of social choreography becomes retroactively possible.

page 183
Modernity is now measured not simply in terms of relative national cultural production (a kind of cultural gross domestic product) but in terms of possibilities for consumption and the ability of urban cultural entrepreneurs to bring international cultural goods to the marketplace. Specifically, of course, it was American that came to stand for all things modern and that came to be showcased on the Weimar revue stage. Moreover, the revue itself changed as a mode of production. Under the aegis of figures such as Erik Charell (1894 – 1973), James Klein (1886 – 1940s), and Herrmann Haller (1871 -1943), the mondain entertainments of the prewar period were replaced by the kinds of megaspectacle that prompted theorists such as Kracauer to develop ideas of “the mass ornament” to account for such new forms of entertainment. On a given night in the peak season of 1926 – 27, Berlin's competing revues collectively seated upward of eleven thousand people. As the title of Charell's 1924 revue indicates, this form of entertainment was intended For Everyone! (“An Alle!”). Perceived cultural sophistication consisted less in the judgement of an elite, social or cultural, but in the very operation of the market itself, in its ability to match what was on offer elsewhere and to disseminate the goods to a mass public. Cosmopolitan sophistication and mass dissemination went hand in hand.

page 185 – 186
It is this harnessing of ideals of primal rhythm to the realities of mass production that rendered the phenomenon of cultural rationalization so attractive to the German intellectuals of this period. As if in fulfillment of Moeller van den Bruck's 1902 prediction, the girls have transformed rational, agnostic modernization into a mythic logic of its own; they have reconciled the organic and the mechanical, the rhythmic and the rational, in ways that made them a peculiarly potent symbol to a generation of intellectuals fluent in the critical vocabulary of Lebensphilosophie.

page 186
While I would not wish to argue that the pre/post World War I divide is marked by the erasure of all display, it seems clear that for intellectuals of the time the original thrill of seeing something displayed is replaced by seeing something in motion, performed or, in fact, produced. Truth is no longer something extrinsic that needs to be displayed (as in a sexual revelation) but rather is something that has to be performatively produced: it is, needed, the very fact of production, its inexorability, that is the truth. Performativity, here, needs to be understood not in terms of a playful questioning of the absoluteness of truth but as cultural work, the work of the production line that the girls brought to the revue. Truth no longer lies in Schillerian realm of play―whereby an individual freely reconciles himself with the dictates of a choreographic necessity―but in the impersonal dictates of a system of mass production that nevertheless traps into a primal force greater than the contingent historical subject herself.

page 187
The female body always has a certain self-referentially fetishistic function: it stands for what is hidden; and what is hidden, more often than not, is the secret of female sexuality. The male body, meanwhile―and here Steve Neale uses the classic example of the Western gunfight―can be shown in close-up only at the moment of a test, when some special performance or achievement is demanded of it; the function being that we are looking not at the body but at its actions.

page 188
“The idea of animating a whole string of young girls in perfect synchronicity is a truly American mechanization of the principle of ballet: but a mechanized form can also be perfectly beautiful if its precision is immidiatly apparent. The Tiller Girls succeed in this.” Hans W. Fischer, Körperschönheit und Körpercultur: Sport, Tanz, Gymnastik, 1928

page 191 – 192
The shift from woman to girl, I will argue, is a shift from ideology as a system of belief to ideology as a self-sustaining and self-legitimating social function, a shift from the promise of revelation to the reality of mere motion or function.
The figure of Woman as emblem of mass culture (examined in detail by critics such as Andreas Huyssen and Tania Modleski) relied on the fantasy of a physicality and fleshliness that threatened to engulf the male consumer. Woman figures an organic unity that promised an enfolding cultural totality in the face of modernist, masculine rationalization, but her sexual allure potentially disempowered the male viewer, subjugating him to that mythic totality. She was, in archetypical terms, the siren whose story one could hear only at the cost of one's life. Thus, nineteenth-century responses to emergent mass culture often pick up the rhetoric of contemporary mass psychologists such as LeBon, according to whom the mass or mob was feminized and irrational. “If the mass can be seduced and led like a woman,” the argument would go, “its cultural forms might in turn seduce and engulf you like a woman.” The ideology of the Girl has given up on this engulfing totality as its referent, and thus cannot present even the female performer herself in a cohesive bodily form.

page 192
The Girl offers neither the threat nor the promise of a reintegrated organic culture because she herself is inorganic. With respect to the female body and popular culture, then, I wish to argue that critics of an emerging mass culture were caught between the observation of the new phenomenon and the absence of new tools of analysis for its comprehension. Thus, the “mass” of mass culture would first be grasped in terms of a nineteenth-century tradition of social theory exemplified by figures such as LeBon―as something irrational and primeval, intrinsically feminine. The figure of the Woman negates all difference and mediation of offering a satisfaction―a revelation, a nakedness―that simultaneously threatens. . . . In other words, the Girls perform the opposite function to Woman, parsing out into metonymic seriality the concept of the mass that the Woman still managed to embody in a total symbolic form. Whereas the Woman figured male anxiety at the potential loss of identity in a newly emerging mass culture, the Girls are themselves disembodied and disseminated. Their seriality entails a whole new notion of the mass and a whole new notion of truth in ideology. There is no longer a truth to be revealed as something primal and hidden, and the Girls are quite upfront in revealing that there is nothing to reveal.

page 196
The idea of a social choreography becomes useful precisely at the point―and I am arguing that Kracauer's critical legacy marks that point―where we no longer simply read back from cultural production to its socioeconomic base. To simplify, in social choreography we are obliged to see not so much a “working through” of social reality in aesthetic form but rather an “acting out” that blurs the distinction of aesthetic and nonaesthetic (when is a movement a dance?) and demands a new critical method and vocabulary for the analysis of ideology.

page 200
The relationship of the mass ornament to its particular society is harder to pin down―precisely because it hovers. The organic ornament is “grounded” in its social context―this is what makes it “magical.” To this extent, Kracauer seems to be linking magic to mythic structures, to the possibility of a grounding of reference as opposed to the indeterminate “hovering” of the mass ornament. While it is possible to read mimetically―and mythically―from the organic ornament to its referent and ground, the mass ornament has been emptied out of content to become, implicitly, a “pure assemblage of lines.” This image of the line appeals because we will encounter it again and again in writings of Kracauer and his contemporaries in the form of the high-stepping chorus line. Almost paradoxically, the chorus girls will come to stand symbolically for the end of grounded symbolic reference. Their line symbolizes the linearity of metonymy and deferral that seems to characterize the mass ornament. To this extent, as we shall see, they stand at the very threshold of legibility as cultural phenomenon. They do not represent the end of representation as the crucial term in a critique of ideology―they perform it. Similarly, the mass does not represent itself in its ornaments―it performs itself.

page 200
Although the central figures of the “Mass Ornament” essay are the famous Tiller Girls, Kracauer insists that the ornamental be read at two levels: on the one hand as the spectacle provided by the girls themselves; on the other as the configurations, or “stars,” that such performances produce from the audience, from “the masses, themselves arranged by the stands in tier upon ordered tier”. This too is characteristic of social choreography as I have conceived it in this book: an altered relationship of the audience to its acknowledged representation. It figures the distinction between what I earlier called the integrative ( or performative) and the mimetic forms of social totality.

page 203
John Ruskin: “The wilder dances of other races are nothing more than their folk dances reduced to the most expressly sexual form . . . In the Can Can the first stirrings of the mass take shape, the desire to transcend everyday reality for something higher”. Already in 1902, Moeller sees emerging from within the sexual and choreographic realms a distinction of Volk and Masse. The mass is not at all a merely quantitative phenomenon, and it marks not the disruption of transcendence but, by its demand for standardization, a movement toward the transcendence of individualized sexual desire.

page 203
Girlkultur demonstrates the importance of narrative as a ritual act of social cohesion rather than as a mythic reference to communal values. Rationalization is the modality rather than the referent of the Girl's performance.

page 205
In the shift from woman to girl we have a move from symbolic to asymbolic cultures, from reference to performance. Kracauer observes of modern society that “it can no longer transform itself into powerful symbolic forms, as it could among primitive peoples and in the era of religious cults.” In other words, the mass ornament no longer represents symbolically the collective that produces it, but rather produces a spurious collective that is incapable of representing. “It is the rational and empty form of the cult, devoid of any explicit meaning, that appears in the mass ornament. The mass ornament is not, therefore, a “symbol” from which we can “read” back to a sociohistorical referent.

page 209
What interests me about social choreography as a critical method is its acknowledgment that the work of aestheticizing the individual and the work of aestheticizing the collective are supposed to be one and the same. . . . My reason for privileging the aesthetic, as a tool for the critique of ideology, however, is precisely not because it performs the ideological and material work that Schiller reserves for it, but because, as we have seen throughout this book, the aesthetic sense of self―once developed as a function of choreography―serves always to mark the threshold over which we stumble in our entry into society.

page 210
What Kracauer realizes on seeing the Jackson Girls is essentially what Zizek argues when he writes: “This is exactly how capitalism differs from other, previous modes of production: in the latter, we can speak of periods of 'accordance' when the process of social production and reproduction goes on as a quiet, circular movement, and of periods of convulsion when the contradiction between forces and relations aggravates itself; whereas in capitalism this contradiction, the discord forces/ relation is contained in its very concept.

page 210
In Zizek's terms from the same essay: “Ideology is not simply a 'false consciousness,' an illusory representation of reality itself which is already to be conceived 'ideological'―'ideological' is a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence . . . 'Ideological' is not the 'false consciousness' of a (social) being, but this being itself in so far as it is supported by 'false consciousness'”

page 211
By hypostatizing the choreographic experience as the locus of knowledge beyond knowledge―a knowledge of the (metaphysical, or even mere anthropological) “beyond”―early modern dance necessitated a realm of nonknowledge―a realm of “display” to which the contradictions have been banished.
I have been tracing through this work a double history: a tentatively sketched history of specific, sequential, and often overlapping social choreographies on the one hand, and a history of method on the other. This secondary history of method demonstrates not only how the content of ideological structures changed, but how the very operation of the ideological shifted from an essentially “literate” to an embodied and performative experience. My claim has been that the performative nature of choreography necessitates a shift in our understanding of ideology. The two histories―a history of method and a history of social choreographies―rejoin each other at the moment where the specific “historical” choreographies produce and necessitate a new critical method. In other words, social choreography cannot be understood as a self-evident category of analysis for all societies. Rather, it becomes apparent and manifest only at a certain historical point as a way of retrospectively rethinking social structures.

page 212
When ideology reveals itself to have a history after all, an analysis of social choreography would be the critical method that asks not what things stand for but how they stand at all.