Cutting together-apart (une greffe)

Abstract

Throughout this article we have transplanted passages from Karen Barad and Jean-Luc Nancy, threading their voices through one another and with our own, such that we remain responsible for our re/configuration of these estranged articulations. With reference to our ongoing use of heart rate sensors in choreography and composition, as well as our practice of Relational Listening, we foreground the metaphors of grafting (Nancy) and diffraction (Barad) to probe the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of ongoing differentiation within and between bodies, movements, voices, and identities.

Notes

1 Comparison, simile, metaphor, citation and appropriation are all strategies by which the boundaries of authorship are continually (re)enacted. In order for an author, or authors such as ourselves, to bring multiple things together (voices, ideas, texts, bodies, disciplines), they/we must first assume a relation of difference through which the cohabitation of these things in a shared context comes to matter. Throughout this article we have transplanted passages from Barad and Nancy, threading their voices through one another and with our own, such that we remain responsible for our (re)configuration of these estranged articulations, as well as for the ways in which they intrude on our sovereignty as authors. We have not set apart authorial contributions by way of traditional citation in the body of the text, for this would only obscure the implications of our transgression, which is at once aesthetic and ethical. Instead, all passages from Barad are indicated using quote marks, while all passages from Nancy are in French; we then provide full citations and translations at the end of the article. As we see it, in-line references, in this case, would merely act as bandages to cover up the effects of our frequent dissection and (re) contextualization of authored materials into a foreign body; they would not prevent the bleeding of voices into one another.

2 As we take (apart) and make the words of others our own, it is inevitable that aspects of their plurality, for example the ways in which they have always already been cut together-apart by/ with other authors, will be lost in transit. The many notions that we invoke from Barad in this article, for example diffraction, intra-action, cutting together-apart and exteriority-within, in turn invoke their own hybrid genealogies. The notion of diffraction, for example, grafted from physics into feminism by Barad, and presently into this text by yours truly, performs differently in different contexts, even as it (re)articulates what the boundaries of these contexts may be(come). This text is haunted by all that we have excluded, intentionally or not; the absent presence of others haunts our authority, intruding nonetheless by way of allusion, association and insinuation. Some influences may seem obvious, for example Butler, Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault, and Haraway, while others, such as the many dancers and musicians with whom we collaborate, remain less overt. Moreover, our practice of Relational Listening may conjure other listening practices described variously as relational, empathetic, interpretative, reduced and deep, attributed to artists/ scholars such as Rogers, Stewart, Schaeffer, Chion and Oliveros. No registry can account for all that has been given and taken; intent and consent must be continually (re)enacted, in situ, such that practices of care and responsibility honour the ceaseless cutting together-apart of past/present, self/other. The effects of transplantation, like those of appropriation, are never confined to the act of cutting itself; the violence of taking something (in), of becoming familiar with the enduring effects of irreconcilable difference, will never cease.