dance #123, haecceity I

Thursday April 23, 2009

Haecceity I

“There is a mode of individuation very different from that of a person, subject, thing, or substance. We reserve the name haecceity for it. A season, a winter, a summer, an hour, a date have a perfect individuality lacking nothing even though this individuality is different from that of a thing or a subject. They are haecceities in the sense that they consist entirely of relations of movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities to affect and be affected…It should not be thought that a haecceity consists simply of a décor or backdrop that situates subjects, or of appendages that hold things and people to the ground. It is the entire assemblage in its individuated aggregate that is a haecceity; it is this assemblage that is defined by a longitude and a latitude, by speeds and affects, independently of forms and subjects, which belong to another plane. It is the wolf itself, and the horse, and the child, that cease to be subjects to become events, in assemblages that are inseparable from an hour, a season, an atmosphere, an air, a life…Spatiotemporal relations, determination, are not predicates of the thing but dimensions of multiplicities…” Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 261-263.

10:10 p.m. An 8 minute dance in a study, under a slice of sky, at this hour, on a fine, clear night.  So much energy. Such intensity. Thrashings, lungings, anglings and weavings. A street cleaning machine rumbles down the street. A car alarm ignites and wails into the night. A dance continues with such intensity, so much light. A cat moves into and through the dance. Draws with me. Is perched behind me on the arm chair, head down, while I post. The night is clear. The stars faint and dancing in the cooling night air.

~ by nmyers on April 23, 2009.