The Given Body, Invisible
Jean-Luc Marion, another contemporary' philosopher working in the phenomenological tradition, has introduced the idea of givenness in order to indicate that any thing visually experienced is already subject to an originary condition that makes this visibility possible. The examples just given, indicating the possibility of a veiled body (Fuller’s body outside its organic shape) or a body made of fragmented parts as in Solo, suggest that the body in dance is experienced by way of a unique a priori condition on the way it presents itself as visible. Marion names the condition that precedes our experience and determines it to be the givenness of the phenomenon and shows that givenness inserts a distorting interval between the thing in itself and the image produced by way of this condition.
In order to clarify the nature of the distortion involved, let us look at just one illuminating visual example from Marion and then complement it with an example from dance. Diirer’s Lamentation for Christ (approx. 1500) (Marion, 2004, p. 7) describes a scene which is conveyed by employing perspective methods, and Marion shows how perspective mediates between the visible canvas and the effect of depth produced. The painting in itself is nothing but a meaningless surface covered with colored paint and it is what is called “perspective” that creates depth in the painted scene. But how does perspective mediate the painted canvas and the depth of the depicted scene?
This painting, as many in this “golden age” of perspective art, disguises and at the same time exposes the artificiality of geometrical perspective. But Marion does not describe the artificiality of perspective; rather, he indicates how perspective is essential for creating visibility. First, perspective is not something visually tangible per se, and it is by its invisible nature that it allows us to experience the diagonal arrangement of the figures on the canvas, the constant oblique rising of the composition from one line of human figures to the next, as a series of layers, that is, as depth. Perspective hence introduces an irreal dimension of the picture, producing visibility as depth (i.e., there is nothing “natural” or real-like in the construction of depth, and yet it is what makes the painting realistic). Lastly, Dürer blatantly exposes the distorting effect of perspective by leaving the personages of the patrons at the bottom of the canvas outside the perspective scheme (sized on a much smaller scale than the rest of the scene). Dürer “excludes them from perspective; the painting is only partially governed by the organizing principle of perspective, from which it is necessary to conclude that perspective itself is invisible” (Ibid., p. 8-9).
By stressing these aspects of the painting’s terms of visibility, Marion succeeds in bringing out the fact that perspective is not tantamount to the arrangement on the canvas, but to a prior condition on visibility as such, a condition that allows the observer to “translate” this arrangement into depth. As such a condition, perspective is equivalent to the way we are led to observe the scene, to experience the painted canvas. Perspective in this spectacle of lament is an invisible condition on visibility that produces an effect of depth. Perspective inscribes in the picture something (depth) we cannot identify with any visible element in the painting.
In some places, Marion names the invisible thing that is the vehicle for crossing the flatness of a painting, what creates the depth of a painting—anamorphosis (Marion, 2004, p. 12).6 This term that originates in visual language, indicates the transformation of form, a distortion that requires reconstruction according to adequate methods to become visible. The invisible, Marion shows, is a kind of anamorphosis exercised in every painting, and it could not be exercised if the painting did not “always already contradict the expectation of the gaze, or at least only satisfy it by still frustrating it” (Ibid., p. 41). The idea of anamorphosis indicates that only through a method that instructs us how a thing is given, can we experience the visibility of reality. “The more the invisible is increased, the more the visible is deepened” (Ibid., p. 5). The more perspective, the condition on visibility, is increased in the painting (as a combination of colors, shapes, light, and shadow), the more the depth of the scene becomes visible. Perspective, in between the visible object and the image viewed, is a condition of visibility which is itself invisible, distorting, and irreal.
The relation of perspective to depth in painting is similar to the relation of detachment to the dancing body, which will be illustrated here through the practice of group dance. Group dance is a powerful and peculiar practice of dance in which dancers move in a group in a more or less uniform manner. Sometimes the group decomposes into smaller clusters, and sometimes a dancer is separated from the group to dance a solo. Detachment can account for the way a single dancing body would be experienced in relation to the group and with the following example we will see that detachment of the single dancer from the unity of person, is assumed as a prior condition to group dance. Pina Bausch’s Rite of Spring (197 5)7 can exemplify that group dance assumes the body of the dancer as an impersonal singularity. In this work, one of the intriguing scenes is that of selecting the chosen one to be sacrificed. The work as composed by Stravinsky and originally choreographed by Nijinsky, in fact, puts in a central place the scene of the young girl chosen as victim to then dance herself to death. However, the choosing of the one who among the ensemble of dancers will stand out to be sacrificed does not decompose the group nor single out the sacrificed one as a victim.
So the scene is intriguing both because it marks out one from among a group that dances-as-one and because the chosen one is part of the group (rather than its victimized/ excluded member). Bausch sets up a version in which the distortive and haphazard gesture of selection is accentuated: it is not a dancer chosen to be sacrificed, but a process of choosing is enacted with a piece of red cloth, tossed away and around, time and again, until a dancer gives her consent to it, puts it on, as if half-aware, thus isolating herself from the others. With this gesture the invisible condition of dance is made visible through the evident fact that the one chosen in dance is not personally chosen as a victim nor is her choice due to an interior cause. The one who dances the victim remains a member of the group and only contingently marked out.
The invisible condition of dance is such that the disengagement of one body from a group of bodies cannot be related to the dancer herself, to something subjective that makes this dancer a candidate for sacrifice (while in drama for instance, the one to be sacrificed is chosen on the grounds of concrete traits—like being the daughter of the victorious commander or being the first-born of the ruler). The procedure of selection of the one from the group hence follows the invisible condition of dance according to which the singular body is not distinguished from others by way of personal or interior qualities. This idea of the singular dancing body-to-itself, is not confined to modern/contemporary dance. In the context of classical dance also, when a singular dancer is marked out for solo, the dancer’s singularity is not “personal”, nor “meaningful”. Bausch’s Rite of Spring appears to expose this fact.
The invisible condition which determines how a phenomenon is experienced is described by Marion as its givenness. This notion of givenness stresses that what makes a phenomenon visible is not imposed by the observer but is rather owing to the way the phenomenon imposes its reality (including the way we should orient ourselves with regard to it) on us. A thing is given in a certain way before it turns into an object for our perception and apprehension. There is a primary condition that determines the way we experience things, their givenness, which predicates neither the perceiver nor the perceived (object). Positively put, givenness is a kind of vanishing mediator between the two, yet it attributes priority to the object and to the way it imposes a mode of experiencing it. Givenness refers to the very hinge on which a thing is transformed into a visible final form and is irreducible to either a real object or to a consciousness.8
Givenness is a notion that aims to capture these terms that condition at an originary phase how we look at something and, as was articulated through the case of perspective, remain invisible. Marion proposes that while knowledge always traffics in images, its origin remains invisible. Hence, the thing we see, our referent, is in a sense always missing (we can see a cube from six different sides, but never actually see it) (Ibid., p. 54-5). Following this notion of givenness as the invisible condition that produces a visible image, we can now return to the visibility of the dancing body.
To grasp the idea of givenness in relation to the visibility of the body, we will start with an example outside dance:
“About three years ago,” I said, “I was bathing with a young man who at that time had a wonderful quality of physical grace. He was about sixteen years old; and since he had only vaguely attracted the attention of women, the first traces of vanity were barely discernible. It happened that we had both just seen the statue of the youth removing a splinter from his foot; (the cast of this sculpture is included in most German collections). As my young friend was drying himself, he put his foot on a stool; a glance at his reflection in a large mirror reminded him of the statue. He smiled and told me his discovery. In fact I had made the same discovery at that very moment, but to counter his vanity I laughed and replied that he was seeing ghosts. He blushed and lifted his foot a second time to show me. Of course, the experiment failed. Confused, he lifted his foot a third and fourth time; he lifted it possibly ten times in all and in vain. He was incapable of reproducing the gesture; in fact, the movement that he made had such an clement of oddity that it was hard for me to repress my laughter.
“From that day on, practically from the very moment, the young man was changed. Day after day he stood before a mirror, and one by one his charms fell away from him. An invisible and inconceivable pressure (like an iron net) seemed to confine the free flow of his gestures, and after a year had passed there remained not a trace of that loveliness that had so delighted everyone.”
(On the Marionette Theater, Heinrich von Kleist)
With this excerpt from Kleist, we can first question the fundamental intuition we have regarding the presence of the body as an immediate object of visual perception. Regardless of how we interpret the scene depicted, it undermines the possibility of knowing anything about the body in itself (i.e., the question of whether the boy’s body is actually beautiful or graceless remains undecided). The difficulty seems to stem from the fact that the idea of the body is always and already mediated, personalized', that is, the body as imaged already assumes a person who regulates this image. But by exemplifying the disrupted relations of the person with the body, Kleist demonstrates the impossibility of personalizing the body, the resistance of the body to the unity of a person. .And when the body is impersonalized, it is reduced to an assembly of body parts, to a mere combination of organs which the person cannot control.
The declining charm of the boy’s body hence exemplifies the idea that the visibility of the body as object of perception is not a primary given because there is a prior condition on making the body a complete visible image, and here the condition is that of the unity of a person.
Kleist brings out very vividly the presence of this prior condition on the visibility of the body by pointing at something we habitually overlook: the irreducible distance between the visible body, that is, the body image, and what the body is in and to itself. We tend to bridge this distance with any principle of unification, like “person”, that would turn the body into a visible thing. The body is hence visible because it is already returning to our gaze as personalized.
In questioning the straightforward relation of body to person, Kleist does not only indicate a possible disruption between the body and the person (that a beautiful body can be inhabited by a despaired soul that will gradually dim this beauty) but undermines our very assumption that the person or individual can consolidate the identity of the body. What the body reflects is not the unity of a person, as this unity is disintegrated by the power of the other’s (narrator’s) gaze, or by the unsteadiness of the person. Kleist, in other words, made apparent that the visibility of the body is neither maintained by the person nor by the other’s gaze—these rather distort (anamorphize) the reality of the body. The image of the body made visible by Kleist is of a body resistant to unity.
What is exemplified here can also be claimed regarding the dancing body: the originary condition on the visibility of the dancing body is that the body in dance is not given as a unity. This condition, itself invisible, is exposed in dance where the relation of the body to the unity assumed by singular identity or by a person, is questioned. Our claim is that the dancing body is conditioned by detachment in the sense that the dancing body permanently maintains an irreducible distance between the single body in dance and any organizing/ unifying principle (in terms of person or purpose). The dancing body is the spectacle that resists such a unification, and this resistance to the unity of person, or of purpose, is what constitutes its visibility as a dancing body.
The example from Kleist shows how control over one’s body can be lost, even reversed (the body rises against its “owner”) or severely disrupted; hence we come across the fact that it was the unity of a person that had stipulated the givenness of the body. Once this condition (of the unity of a person) is removed, the givenness of the body must assume other conditions, and we need alternative terms for grasping the body’s singularity. This idea exemplified here, that a body is neither immediate nor unified, is the body that the art of dance relies on.
So the body is given as visible on condition of a prior principle and since the principle of the unity of a person is so automatically and widely applied, we tend to apply it also to dance (Kleist’s is an illustration of how this automatism can be disrupted in contexts other than dance). Our claim is that dance is permanently detached from the unifying condition of a person or purpose and creates its effects through the disruption of the body’s relation to principles of unity.
Let us briefly look at another case of disruption, as seized by Nietzsche in The Gay Science, to further support our attempt to disengage the body image from the conditions of its visibility. Here Nietzsche describes the sick person, who has lost control over the body due to illness and surrenders body and soul to science. But what does “surrendering the body” mean in this context? Nietzsche maintains that in case that person is a philosopher “the unconscious disguise of physiological needs under the cloaks of the objective, ideal, purely spiritual goes to frightening length” (Nietzsche, 1974, p. 34). In other words, the philosophical temperament is bound to interpret the reality of the sick body in a philosophical way (rather than flatly surrendering the body to medicine). As in the case Kleist presents, in this example, too, the moment when one appears to lose control over one’s body is a moment that exposes the body phenomenon as already determined by an originary condition of visibility. The body of the philosopher is given through ideal assumptions regarding the uselessness of the body. The ideal assumptions of the philosopher pre-determine that the ailments of the philosopher’s body would not affect the philosopher’s mind. The philosopher solves the loss of control over the personal body by assuming a body that is already alien to thought, a burden on spirit, and hence belongs to a separate reality than the reality of thought. Note that here also, philosophical tradition has offered diverse explanations of the limited control of one’s body, explanations that made the body a non-issue for philosophy; but whatever the philosophical explanation to excluding the body, it complies with the philosophical condition posed on the visibility of the body. According to this condition, the body of the philosopher is already evacuated, devoid of philosophical spirit. In other words, the general condition which defines the givenness of the philosophical body is that of the evacuation of the body of spirit (or reason), a condition that holds from Descartes until a late stage in the history of philosophy (signaled by the advent of phenomenological thought).
If the body of the philosopher is un-inhabited by the philosopher (because this body tends to fall ill, Nietzsche suggests), and hence hardly has exteriority, the body of the dancer on stage has no inferiority. So while phenomenologically the body appears as visible in both cases, it is the distorting condition of givenness, that makes the body visible in a specific way.
